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Re: #830 and #831It was Marx—not Engels—who criticizes Feuerbach for failing to conceive “human practice itself as objective practice”¹ and “sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity”.² Nobody respects your duplicitous ploy of wriggling out of a fix, by swapping Engels—universally detested scapegoat for the Leninist Left’s miserable failings—in place of Marx.Marx has just said that social life depends on our universal apprehension of sensuous and practical objectivity.³ You, an anti-objective social constructionist, flatly deny Marx—not Engels.If you aren’t inclined to critique my exposure of the hitherto-unnoticed⁴ “objectivity-of-social-practice” thread running through Marx’s—not Engels’s—Theses on Feuerbach, then you might favour us by solving a much simpler problem that we ordinary folks can only accomplish daily by taking our apprehension of sensuous and practical activity as objective:Unlike the rest of us, you do not take our sensuously perceived shoes and shoelaces as objective sensuousness.Unlike the rest of us, you do not take our shoelace-tying practice as objective practice.How then, unlike the rest of us, do you—an anti-objective social constructionist—manage to anti-objectively tie anti-objective shoelaces on anti-objective shoes by anti-objective practice, unless your anti-objective conceptions of anti-shoes, anti-shoelaces, anti-shoelace-tying, and the anti-world in which this anti-objective mystery is anti-objectively acted out are actually objective in the first place—and are all actually conceived by you to be objective?And don’t you ever again presume to respond by playing that dirty switching game on us again. You know precisely who wrote what.Notes ⁽¹⁾ Thesis I. ⁽²⁾ Thesis V. ⁽³⁾ Whether our comprehension of such objectivity is adequate to it is the subject of Thesis II. ⁽⁴⁾ Unnoticed, because most Marx “scholarship”—whose quality I’ve occasionally exposed here as appalling—has been conducted by Leninist academics who support voluntarism, which is actually ambivalent on objectivity.
What the Theses on Feuerbach are About The Theses on Feuerbach are Marx’s final severance, his parting of the ways, with subjective philosophical thought.They record Marx’s discovery of how society actually comes to comprehend objective truth. 1. The Inverted Consciousness of an Inverted WorldMarx’s road to the Theses from 1843 to 1845:1843. Marx¹ farewells the criticism of religion “which has been essentially completed”, and embarks on the criticism of a society that needs religion.Marx develops the insight that an “inverted” society breeds an “inverted consciousness”.² Marx reduces all thought—not just religious thought—to expressions of social conditions. He establishes himself as the arch materialist.1844. Marx³ investigates the social production of “inverted consciousness” [or “false consciousness”]: hence his fixation on “alienation” [mutual “self-estrangement”]. Marx recognizes that:all philosophy, including his own, succumbs to his materialist critique;materialism and philosophy are mutually incompatible—each, on its own terms, subverts the other.He seeks a non-philosophical criterion of truth.1845. Marx⁴ makes the breakthrough. He discovers the objectivity inherent in social practice.2. The Objectivity of Social PracticeHere we follow Marx’s “objectivity-of-social-practice” trail throughout his Theses on Feuerbach:⁵ Thesis I.“Feuerbach does not conceive human activity as objective activity”.i.e. Marx does conceive human activity as objective activity.Thesis II.“whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is a practical question.”i.e. objective truth is not an attribute of thought but of practice;objective truth derives from practice, not from thought.consciousness, being subjective, derives its objectivity solely from social practice.“Man must prove the [objective] truth of his thinking in practice”i.e. man must translate his thought into practice in order to prove its objective truth.⁶ “The [objective] reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is purely scholastic”i.e. philosophical “reality” is imagined “reality” like all products of the imagination: religion, myth, fiction;Thesis III.“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and [the changing] of human activity [= social practice], or self-change, can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”⁷ Thesis V.“Feuerbach does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”i.e. Marx does conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity;social life depends on our treating “sensuous” phenomena practically [= objectively];we approach “sensuous” appearance practically [= objectively];we survive because we take “sensuous” appearance to be objective;we can objectively gather “sensuous” [= empirical] data about the world that is itself objective.⁸ Thesis VIII.“All social life is essentially practical.”⁹ i.e. thought is ultimately a superstructural aid to practice.“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”i.e. thought can spin fantasies without objective [= practical] restraint;thought can ignore the constraints of objective reality without objective consequence;practice must comply with the constraints of objective reality, or else suffer objective consequences;i.e. objective thought can be nothing other than the comprehension of objective practice.Thesis XI.“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”In addition to its obvious revolutionary meaning and implications…philosophy is powerless to anchor socialism objectively;social life is essentially practical;(for the benefit of voluntarists) consciousness is superstructural to social practice;revolutionary Marx entered the search for objectivity as a thinking philosopher, and leaves it as a practicing scientist.3. Notes ⁽¹⁾ Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1843–44], Introduction. ⁽²⁾ Joseph McCarney, in a parade of scholarly ineptitude, omitted to perform a thesaural expansion of his search term “false consciousness”, and so let slip through his leaky sieve the associated terms “inverted consciousness”, “self-estrangement” and “alienation”. Consequently McCarney missed Marx’s classic reference to “inverted consciousness”¹ that everyone knows by heart.McCarney’s slipshod scholarship explodes his [anti]marx myth on (since L&W withdrew MECW) the [anti]Marx Internet Archive. ⁽³⁾ Marx: Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. ⁽⁴⁾ Marx: Theses on Feuerbach. ⁽⁵⁾ The terms objectivity and practice are italicized throughout to emphasize Marx’s key discovery of the “social objectivity of social practice”. ⁽⁶⁾ Engels paraphrases Thesis II in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, “human action [= social practice] solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity [= philosophical thought] invented it. The proof of the pudding [= objective truth] is in the eating [= social practice].” ⁽⁷⁾ Thesis III states that, if circumstances determine men, men can only determine circumstances and so change themselves by changing circumstances through revolutionary [= not normal] practice [cf. Thomas Kuhn], ⁽⁸⁾ For the mature Marx of Capital, “sensuous” appearance is both objective and concrete. It finds its abstract explanation in science, and provides science with its criterion of scientific objectivity. ⁽⁹⁾ The mature Marx, in his classic formulation of the materialist conception of history in his famous Preface to A Contribution towards a Critique of Political Economy, gets to the heart of the matter “social being determines consciousness”.
A Matter of Perception[Relocated by request of moderator1]
LBird wrote:a ‘fossil’ won’t exist for the Neolithic hunter employing a rock as flint to light a fireOf course, though, the fossil ‘exist’, [but it] can [only] be observed by the ‘educated’ observer. In our case as proletarians, [to be able to observe value] means being educated in class consciousness and Communism.if a human directs their attention to one level (e.g. a rock), they are by choice not directing their attention to other levels (eg. fossils).Flint with FossilUniversity of Cambridge, Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, Id #1916.82/Record 2. Paleolithic handaxe—100,000 to 10,000 BCE. [West Tofts, Norfolk, England]——————————————————Fossils fascinated some of our ancestors.This handaxe is fashioned symmetrically around a Cretaceous marine fossil [the mollusc Spondylus spinosus] that appears intended to attract visual attention. The artefact was written up scientifically almost 40 years ago by Kenneth Oakley, who had previously exposed the infamous big-brained ‘missing link’ Piltdown Man—a scientific hoax sustained for half-a-century by idealist preconceptions of cranial complexity precipitating our move from ape into humanity.A century earlier, Engels surmised, on the basis of the materialist conception of history, that it was descent from the forest to the savannah, that unleashed the niche pressure for selecting upright stance and bipedal locomotion. Anatomical adaptation to life on the open plains had the collateral effect of liberating the hands to fashion tools.By changing its means of production, a species is forced to adjust its social practice of operating them, and so change its mode of production based upon those changed means. Its social existence becomes historical. Under such evolutionary pressure, a species can survive only if its brain can adequately comprehend and adequately communicate its changing social practice, or else vanish from the face of the Earth.Social practice that changes itself seems to have driven hominid brain complexity.
At the risk of thrashing-to-death a minor issue…I stumbled by chance upon Eduard Bernstein’s article, of 30 July 1898“What Drove Eleanor Marx to Suicide”It is available athttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1898/07/death-eleanor.htmThis article was written while Bernstein was thinking out his “revisionist” letter to the German Social Democratic Party, which he presented two months later, and subsequently published as “Evolutionary Socialism.
Having written so confidently about Freddy’s parentage, and dismissing Terrell Carver’s account (from my memory of it, which I too hastily dismissed at the time, having read it with my mind already made up by Kapp, and others) because the opposing view had just been reinforced by a lightening read of Rachel Holmes’s new book, which also follows most recent Marx biographers in imputing the siring of Freddy to Marx, I thought I should revisit Carver’s account at http://marxmyths.org/terrell-carver/article.htmI have just re-read it, unblinkered by the new established tradition, and am no longer quite so certain. Carver has done an excellent job in laying out the opposing case. I recommend Carver’s account as a “corrective” for anyone interested in the case of Freddy.
Thanks, Peter. I wasn’t aware that Lewis Feuer re-discovered Freddy’s story.The Social Democrats, Bernstein, and Kautsky, whose not necessarily reliable or unbiased ex-wife is the [gleeful] prime source of the story, were all too painfully aware of it, and of its potential political damage, and in the political and social climate of the times, naturally preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.But Marx’s fleeting liaison with Jenny’s life-long personal domestic-companion since adolescence, and governess of the means of production of the Marx household, and then of Engels’s household—all this in the days before modern domestic appliances—is totally understandable in the close cramped conditions of the Soho flat, and Jenny’s absence, and Marx, with his self-acknowledged Pater familias [i.e. sexual] needs.That the domestic fracas was patched over between Marx, Jenny and Lenchen, speaks volumes about their dependent circumstance and their deep relationships—of course, Carver sees it as speaking against Marx’s fling. That all three had poor “wronged” Freddy as constant reminder, only adds to the poignancy of the situation for all four of them.And Eleanor always assumed that Engels was Freddy’s dad. Yet he was remote in Manchester, and the last person in the world to invade Marx’s household sexual province, and with almost nil opportunity to do so, and whose household Helene moved into after Marx’s death, presumably without bringing their supposed joint offspring back into his rightful domestic fold.As always, Engels it seems took on “reponsibility”, and reluctantly “agreed” to carry the intra-Marx-family can over the matter. Eleanor had naturally been previously cold towards Engels over his presumed paternity yet embarrasingly overt indifference towards his supposed son Freddy, something Engels demonstrably never showed towards Marx’s legitimate offspring.Freddy’s case was simply fraught with too much Marxian pain. Today’s indiscretions are stored out there on the cloud, in Facebook, tweets and emails. The 19th century hoped to consign its indiscretions to the lounge-room fireplace.The proof of Marx’s paternity of Freddy remains circumstantial. And the naming of the boy “Freddy”, unmistakably after Engels, raises all sorts of doubtful and dubious questions, especially if as the evidence points that he was Marx’s son. The issue may never be “solved” to everyone’s satisfaction.Yep, Engels truly was most expert in the world to write authoritatively on “The Origin of the Family”, though silent until the end on Marx’s own.It’s a pity that Freddy never joined the SPGB. I often wonder if Eleanor might have, had she lived another 20 years to her dad’s age.I consider that to be a distinct possibility, which indeed would have been the sort of unbeatable endorsement of the SPGB that the folks seeking outside-of-the-party endorsers can never hope to obtain.Eleanor’s death is a truly great tragedy. Had she lived on, she might have sunk into irretrievable personal and political depression. On the other hand…Her story is certainly is an interesting case study of one side of the difficulty of promulgating Marxian socialism.
It’s a good read.There’s little new to add since Yvonne Kapp’s ground-breaking mammoth two-volume bestseller of the 1970s, but the tale is well told.Eleanor’s tale is the story of one born into the generation after, forever in the shadow of the generation before, but striving to find its own way.Dad prolonged her adolescent infatuation-cum-engagement to Communard Lissagaray, almost two decades older than his precious daughter, but a god in her estimation because a literary Communard. Of course, dad assiduously helped Eleanor translate Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871, the start of a long line of her excellent literary-first translations that include many Ibsen plays and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.On dad’s death she moved in with still-married Edward Aveling, in a free liaison in which each blossomed as intellectual partner in the early socialist movement, under Engels’s guidance and supported unstintingly by Engels’s money—he’d do anything for Marx’s kids, which their lay-about husbands willingly sponged on.As Engels lay dying, speechless through throat cancer, Eleanor extracted from his faltering handwriting on a slate, the shocking fact that dear “cousin” Freddy Demuth, the out-of-wedlock son of the family’s life-long maid, Helene Demuth, was not as Eleanor believed Engels’s illegitimate son, but Marx’s. Poor innocent “wronged” Freddy became her close suffering companion.[Terrell Carver, in Marx myths, disputes Marx’s paternity, but the evidence for it seems overwhelming to me. In any case, apart from Hal Draper’s myth, all the myths on the Marx myths website are bunkum.]Following Engels’s death, key members of her own generation now felt at liberty to question the validity of her father’s works, and her very close companion Eduard Bernstein openly broached revisionism—bringing Marx up to date and user-friendly—using not dissimilar persuasion to what is being offered today on this site.Meanwhile her husband was gravely ill, but had secretly married and moved in with a young stage actress, dropping in on Eleanor whenever he needed her boundless love and understanding, as well as a top-up from Engels’s financial legacy to Eleanor, which he eventually snaffled and then, on his own demise, became the property of the actress who had already ignominiously displaced the trusting Eleanor, of his free socialist liaison, in legal marriage.For socialists unfamiliar with the Marx household and with daughter Eleanor, this is a fascinating read.
Oh Alan, as a materialist, I could never hold that the peasants were inherently stupid, but that their stupidity was a product of their restricted social existence, which Engels rightly despised. I made that obvious from the start. We don’t need a Monthly Review moron like John Bellamy Foster to make such heavy weather of what materialism, as an explanation of human behaviour, has always been about.I thought we all comprehended such basics in our blood. If such things as normal materialism don’t go without saying, the problem with the membership is not one of terminology at all.And frankly, I am certain, from the context, that Engels is overlaying contempt for dumb peasant life because he’s already contemptuous of dumb Proudhon and his own sentimental ideas about the persistence of the rural peasantry, etc. [The Housing Question]. Both the “theorist” and his beloved peasantry are contemptible.You baulk at accepting Engels’s contempt for the peasantry because, in today’s gentrified world, ethnic contempt seems infra dig. Engels held no such false bourgeois scruples.Good night.
Sorry, I did have a duty to read, and ponder, your concerns. I now feel your anxiety.Rest assured, I have considered thoughts, but first to my economics article, which may (or may not) help to explain my thoughts. Couldn’t get on with the article today. So tomorrow.But now, pepys, pepys, …
To alanjjohnstone,Yes, we all know what happened to the Australian party.It was precisely the movers and shakers, moving and shaking away from “socialism”, who moved and shook the party, and moved and shook themselves out of the party. That’s my warning to you. You’ve got the story the wrong way round. More anon.Unfortunately, I’m afraid I must now invoke Sam Pepys’s immortal line — And so to bed. It’s getting late here.
To YMS,Just so. But that doesn’t prevent Engels—the materialist—from engaging in wordplay that overlays biting contempt atop the Greek, to convey disquiet over the thousand-year imposition of stupidity by the feudal system upon its lord, court and, particularly, its serf and peasants. The Elizabethan poet Spencer captures this “brutish rural imbecility” well in his magnificent Faerie Queene. Book II. Canto XII. [A title, by the way, that has none of its modern connotation.]Said Guyon; See the Mind of beastly Man, That hath so soon forgot the Excellence Of his Creation, when he Life began, That now he chuseth, with vile difference, To be a Beast, and lack Intelligence. To whom the Palmer thus: The Dunghil Kind Delights in Filth and foul Incontinence: Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish Mind. But let us hence depart, whilst Weather serves, and Wind.
Thought I should check the translation against the original.
Engels, in original German, wrote:… aus der Isolierung und Verdummung herauszureißen, in der sie seit Jahr-tausenden fast unverändert vegetiert.Engels, in English translation, wrote:… to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years.Engels says Verdummung ≡ dumming.So, Dummkopf, three strikes and out.For the third time, Engels refutes Draper!
Why didn’t you answer my question: “By what evidence do you assert that The socialist movement has felt obliged to abandon the use of an important word because it had become too corrupt”?Now to your question:
alanjjohnstone wrote:“I will ask you to refer me to an article in the Socialist Standard that uses the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as an aspiration of the Socialist Party.”Of course I can’t. But that proves nothing, since your Socialist Standard test backfires.I will ask you to refer me to an article in the Socialist Standard that doesn’t use the term “socialism” as an aspiration of the Socialist Party.I will ask you to refer me to an article in the Socialist Standard that doesn’t refer to the party as the S[ocialist]PGB, or the “Socialist Party”, etc.Socialist Standard usage reveals pride, rather than shame, in the term “socialism”. We therefore should keep it.Now to the minor matter of the ‘idiocy of rural life’.I have never considered Marx and Engels to be insulting over the materialist consequences of social conditions. Their materialist point is clear enough, and Draper explains it, after a fashion. But, Draper misses something vital.Engels wrote the Manifesto (with Marx), and he reproduced the phrase as “idiocy of rural life” [sic] in his 1888 English translation (with Sam Moore).Engels was an expert linguist, superbly adept in German and English. He knew precisely what he was translating from and precisely what he was translating to.Engels was one of the greatest editors the world has seen, and has never been successfully convicted of failing to reproduce Marx with the utmost fidelity.If Engels gave the English Manifesto his imprimatur, that’s good enough imprimatur for me.For the first time, Engels refutes Draper!You insist, on the contrary, that Engels refutes rural idiocy when he says
Engels wrote:the abolition of the town–country antithesis “will be able to deliver [rescue] the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years” (Housing Question) [http://www.socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/02/idiots.htmlIt’s my turn to ask you to explainthe hair-splitting difference between rural idiocy and rural stupor,the non-idiocy of vegetating almost unchanged for thousands of years,why your non-idiotic non-stupid rural population needs to be rescued at all.For the second time, Engels refutes Draper!Finally, to your harmonious solipsist farewell canto “You can sing your own song your own way.”Let me remind you that Marx, Engels, Morris, Fitzgerald, Baritz, Gilmac, Hardy, our forefathers, … sang that “socialist” song in unison.On the other hand, you seem to have no song-in-itself and a bedraggled untrained croaking chorus.
