11. From Hegel to Marx

HEGELIANISM AT A DEAD END

With Hegel, we reach the pinnacle of the history of philosophy as a system of ideas. Here, the development of each branch of the system is so complete and comprehensive, that one feels that all that has to be said has already been said. All that is left is to spin an infinite number of variations on the same themes, as in the intricate sound-world of J. S. Bach.

But, at the moment of its greatest triumph, the Hegelian system began to enter into irreversible decline and dissolution. The crisis of Hegelianism can be simply explained. Hegel carried his all-embracing system so far that it really exhausted the possibilities of philosophy as such. The problems he raised could not be resolved within the limits of a purely ideal system. The inherent weakness of Hegel’s method was that, as an idealist, he did not set out from real, concrete, sensuous human thought, but from an idealist abstraction, which he called self-consciousness. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel sets out from an elementary, embryonic stage of consciousness, proceeding through a whole series of stages, which in their totality embrace the entire history of human thought, from religion, through the history of philosophy, to science.

Hegel’s dialectical method was a huge advance over the earlier philosophy, and it contained many profound insights and flashes of genius. In places (notably, in The Philosophy of History) he comes close to materialism. But, since his starting point was idealism, the real world is here expressed only in an indirect and distorted manner. For this reason, in the end, despite all its undoubted profundity and its many brilliant insights, Hegelian philosophy found itself at an impasse.

The starting point and culmination of the Science of Logic was the Absolute Idea. The problem here was that Hegel stood the relation between subject and object on its head. His method is objective in the sense that it clearly establishes the relation between real things and processes, and their reflection in consciousness. However, in Hegel, thought alienates itself from itself, enters the material world and develops and unfolds within it, only to return to itself at the end of a lengthy evolution, as the Absolute Idea – a universal that has been enriched with all the wealth of the particular.

The Absolute Idea is thought that has become conscious of itself. But, in reality, it is precisely the other way around. Here, reality is only alienated thought, whereas the exact opposite is the real state of affairs. To tell the truth, the entire edifice was merely a ghostly echo of reality. Thought is matter that has become conscious of itself. We do not think only with our mind but with all our senses – with our whole body in fact. What links humans with the external world (nature) is not the abstract thinking of individuals but collective human sensuous activity – social labour, which transforms nature, and at the same time transforms humankind itself.

HEGELIANISM AFTER HEGEL

Some philosophers tried to continue where Hegel had left off in his own terms, i.e. within the framework of traditional philosophy. The Hegelian Right were represented by men like Karl Friedrich Göschel, Johann Philipp Gabler, Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz and Johann Eduard Erdmann. They based themselves on the weakest, most conservative side of Hegel.

For them, the Hegelian dialectic had been carried to its completion, and all that was required was the mechanical repetition of old phrases, which could be applied in an external manner to any content. This, more than anything, resulted in the discrediting of dialectics, which many began to see as a mere exercise in verbal tricks and sophistry. These self-proclaimed disciples of Hegel possessed all of the master’s defects and none of his virtues. Their attempts signally failed to produce anything of interest, and are far inferior to the writings of the great man. They are now no longer a footnote to history. Their writings contain nothing of note and their names have long been consigned to a well-earned oblivion.

HEGELIANISM AS A TOOL OF REACTION

For the Right Hegelians, the autocratic Prussian state represented the highest point of all social development. In this, they seemed to be following in the footsteps of their master. But in reality, this represents only one side of Hegel’s thought – the weakest and least interesting side. Hegel, whose philosophical views were undoubtedly both mystical and idealist, was (at least in his later years) conservative in his political views and tended to support the Prussian Absolutist state. Yes, all this is true and well known. But it does not exhaust the matter under discussion and does not do justice to the essential, dialectical nature of Hegel’s thinking.

In fact, the German authorities were quick to grasp the subversive and revolutionary implications of Hegel’s dialectic. Realising the danger posed by it, the philosophical establishment in Germany made every effort to distance itself from Hegel, preferring to support the ‘Back to Kant’ movement. But in other countries, Hegelianism was eagerly welcomed for its conservative side. That was particularly the case in Britain, where the mystical, idealist elements of Hegel were seen as a useful antidote to materialism.

HEGELIANISM IN THE ANGLO-SAXON WORLD

By this time, religion was fighting a desperate rearguard action against the advance of science, in particular the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, which posed a direct threat to the idea of Creation, and even to the existence of God the Supreme Creator. It was precisely the fear of materialism – with its subversive and revolutionary connotations – that explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of Hegelianism in British universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The British academic establishment searched for a philosophical weapon to strike down the monster of materialism, and found it in Hegelian idealism. As John Passmore points out: “In Germany, Hegelianism had completely failed to arrest the progress of materialism; the fact remains that it was introduced into Great Britain to fulfil that very purpose.”^[1] Similarly, in the USA, the St. Louis Hegelians thought they had found in his philosophy “a sword wherewith to smite the three-headed monster of anarchy in politics, traditionalism in religion and naturalism in science”.^[2]

We have the astonishing spectacle of German philosophy (or, more accurately, a caricature of German philosophy) being imported into British universities, while the ‘theory of knowledge’ – that handmaiden of English empiricism – was exported to Germany, where it was met with equal enthusiasm. For a time, the traditional roles were reversed, with not very positive results in either case. Typical of the British school of vulgarised Hegelianism was the work of J. H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (1865), of which some remarked that: “If Hegel had a secret, Stirling kept it well!” While the great man was still alive, he received scant attention from the British philosophical establishment, whose obsession with empiricism gave rise to a deep-seated mistrust of abstract thought and broad theoretical generalisations which has been the enduring weakness of all Anglo-Saxon philosophy up to the present day.

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE HEGELIAN SCHOOL

In Germany, where the inner decay of the Hegelian School had led to its dissolution into a number of squabbling sects, the situation was different. After the death of Hegel in 1831, his School inevitably disintegrated and fell to pieces, a victim of its own internal contradictions. The decay of Hegelianism was bound to provoke a reaction, and it did. The Hegelian School split into two wings – the right and left. One expression of this was Marxism, which led away from philosophy altogether (at least, philosophy as hitherto understood).

It was Marx and Engels who rescued the healthy kernel of Hegel’s thought from oblivion and restored it as dialectical and historical materialism. The early writings of the founders of scientific socialism clearly display their Hegelian origins. The real settling of accounts with Hegel can be traced to The Holy Family, The German Ideology and, particularly, the famous ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. But Marxism did not spring, ready formed and armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Marx and Engels first had to pass through the preparatory school of the Hegelian Left.

THE HEGELIAN LEFT

As we have noted, the Hegelian Right produced not one figure worthy of mention. Far more interesting was the left wing that crystallised around a group of radical German freethinkers, formed in opposition to the conservative reactionaries. Known variously as the Young Hegelians (Junghegelianer), the Left Hegelians (Linkshegelianer), or the Hegelian Left (die Hegelsche Linke), these brave young men attempted to draw radical conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy.

This was no accident. The Young Hegelians were the product of the religious, philosophical, and political ferment in Germany at that time. This was the period between the Revolution of 1830 in France, which overthrew the reactionary Bourbon monarch Charles X, and the wave of revolutions that swept Europe – including Germany – in 1848 and 1849. The Hegelian Left represented the radical wing of Hegel’s followers. Active in the 1830s and 1840s, they interpreted Hegel’s ideas in the spirit of German liberalism. Their leading members were David Strauss, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, and Bruno and Edgar Bauer. But they also included Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess. The young Marx and Engels were also initially involved in this movement.

Despite its revolutionary claims, this school was entirely preoccupied with abstract philosophical questions and the criticism of religion, reflected in the publication in 1835 of The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu) by David Strauss. This was a critical analysis of the Bible, in which Jesus is portrayed as an ordinary historical personality. Strauss explained this by the traditional persistence of mythological ideas. Later, Bruno Bauer argued that religion was a false consciousness, and that the person of Jesus was a fiction. The radical critique of the New Testament carried out by Strauss and Bruno Bauer represented an important step forward in biblical studies. It laid the basis for the writings of Marx and Engels on religion, and later Kautsky’s masterly work of historical materialism, The Foundations of Christianity.

These were very bold and advanced theories for those times. It took courage to challenge the ideas of the church in the context of general reaction and suffocating censorship. But although they made some advances, their general approach remained idealist, and therefore was condemned to sterility. One of the main concerns was the question of how false consciousness arises in society and becomes a power over the minds of men. The abstract nature of the Young Hegelians’ discussions was partly a result of the strict laws of censorship. But art, literature and religion were the only fields where some degree of critical thought were permitted.

In about 1840, political arguments emerged in the ranks of the Young Hegelians, when the enthronement of Friedrich Wilhelm IV led to a certain relaxation of press censorship. Nevertheless, their pronouncements on religion, philosophy and politics were veiled in an obscure and abstract terminology, characterised by the repeated use of the word ‘critique’. This was later satirised by the writings of Marx and Engels such as The German Ideology and The Holy Family. Despite its radical-sounding phraseology, the debate between the two major Young Hegelians – Strauss and Bauer – remained within the bounds of Hegel’s idealist system. Strauss maintained that the evangelical legends resulted from a spontaneous, subconscious, mythological creativity on the part of the early Christian communities, an expression of the people’s spirit.

On the other hand, Bauer sees the origin of the Bible stories in the activity of certain outstanding religious preachers, who consciously created the myths that constitute a necessary element in the historical development of human self-consciousness. Bauer finally emerged victorious from his polemics with Strauss. His subjective idealist philosophy of self-consciousness became the main theoretical plank of Left Hegelianism. But essentially, nothing had changed. Both Strauss and Bauer criticised Hegel from different points of view, but without ever breaking free from the basic ground of idealism.

THE LIMITATIONS OF THE LEFT HEGELIANS

The revolutionary implications of Hegel’s philosophy were already implicit in the writings of the Left Hegelians, although in a confused and still idealist manner. In order to carry it any further, a complete overturn was required: the total abandonment of idealism and the transition to materialism. But the Left Hegelians were incapable of making that transition. In fact, they were moving in quite the opposite direction. Hegel at least was an objective idealist, whose thought was not merely profound but actually came close to reality on many occasions. The way forward from Hegel – the only possible path of advance – was materialism.

In attempting to erect an alternative to Hegel, the Left Hegelians fell into the trap of extreme subjectivism. Subjective idealism is not superior to objective idealism, but far inferior to it. It is the emptiest, most superficial and least rewarding of all schools of philosophical thought. And it has dominated what passes for philosophy for the whole of the twentieth century. The main characteristic of the writings of the Left Hegelians was extreme individualism, according to which the motive force of history was the ‘critically thinking individual’. By contrast, they regarded the masses as the ‘enemy of the spirit’ and progress, and had no notion of real social or economic development. This reduced all their revolutionary rhetoric to empty phrases.

Their ‘critique’ led them, on the one hand, to a rejection of any form of Christianity and on the other hand, to a most peculiar variant of philosophy (‘radical egoism’) advocated by Max Stirner in his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and its Own). This was one of the founding documents of anarchism and a clear proof of its relationship to bourgeois individualism. In essence, this was really only an idealised aspiration towards liberal (bourgeois) democracy.

But this confused jumble of radical-sounding ideas had far-reaching effects when it entered the brain of a young Russian radical called Mikhail Bakunin, who proclaimed that “the joy of destruction in itself is a creative joy”. This confused school of thought was a complete dead-end, which, by 1844, had ceased to exist as a coherent force, although some of the writings of Bauer still provided something of interest. The bankruptcy of the Hegelian left was finally exposed in the writing of Ludwig Feuerbach.

LUDWIG FEUERBACH

Between Hegel and Marx stands the tragic figure of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). He was the first one to challenge Hegel from a materialist standpoint. In his Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy, he characterised Hegelianism as “the last refuge, the last rational mainstay for theology.” ^[3]Born at Landshut in Bavaria, the young Feuerbach started to study theology in Heidelberg, but within a year abandoned it and, at the age of twenty, went to Berlin to study philosophy under Hegel. He immediately fell under the spell of the great man, and he became an ardent Hegelian. He later became a professor of philosophy at Erlangen.

Although he was identified with the Hegelian Left, Feuerbach was alienated by its empty rhetoric and abstract idealism, and finally became dissatisfied with the whole business. He set out to make a thorough criticism of Hegel’s philosophy from the standpoint of materialism, describing Hegelian idealism as: “the last grand attempt to restore a lost and defunct Christianity through philosophy”.^[4] Feuerbach correctly understood that the roots of Hegel’s idealism (in fact, of all idealism) lay in religion: “Modern philosophy”, he wrote, “proceeded from theology; it is itself nothing else but theology dissolved and transformed into philosophy”.^[5]

And he decided to take an axe to the very roots of idealism by attacking religion itself. This he did in his book, The Essence of Christianity. The appearance of this epoch-making work in 1841 had revolutionary consequences. Feuerbach’s materialist reading of religion in The Essence of Christianity was an important step forward, pointing the way towards a final break with idealism. The impact it had at the time is difficult to overstate. To his contemporaries, he seemed like Prometheus, the Titan who dared to steal fire from the gods and give it to humans. This represented a great philosophical revolution.

Especially great was his impact on the young Marx and Engels. Engels later wrote: “Enthusiasm was universal: we were all Feuerbachians for a moment.”^[6] He alone was willing to carry out an open break with Hegel’s idealism. In place of the old mysticism, he boldly proclaimed an entirely new vision – the materialist doctrine of the unity of humankind and nature:

Matter is an essential object for reason. If there was no matter, reason would have no stimulus and no material for thought and, hence, no content. One cannot give up matter without giving up reason; one cannot acknowledge matter without acknowledging reason.^[7]

His move to materialism was a bold one. It required great courage, especially in the given context of general European reaction and the repressive Prussian state. It provided inspiration to the young Marx and Engels. But ultimately, it failed. Feuerbach regarded human consciousness mainly as a reflection of nature, while also stressing that man came to comprehend his own nature and his relations with other men. Ultimately, however, his conclusions are extremely weak. His only alternative to the domination of religion is education, morality, love, and even a new religion.

Although Feuerbach’s materialism still suffered from defects that prevented him from developing the extremely promising premises that he had discovered, he pointed the way to the revolutionary philosophy of dialectical materialism, which was finally developed by Marx and Engels. At first, Marx and Engels were under the influence of Feuerbach. But very soon they became aware of his failings. They were disappointed by Feuerbach’s reluctance to draw all the conclusions from his own ideas. His writings, especially The Essence of Christianity, contain valuable insights on the subjects of alienation and the connection between idealism and religion. He was extremely critical of the idealist nature of Hegelian dialectics.

Feuerbach made philosophy come down from the clouds of speculation to the human level – to normal, material human beings who are derived from nature and are an integral part of it. That was an important step forward. But his materialism was not capable of answering the questions that it posed. At the centre of Feuerbach’s philosophy is man. But Feuerbach takes man, not as a social being, but as an abstract individual. As such, this philosophy bore very little relation to the real world of men and women. Real history and real social development are conspicuous by their absence in the writings of Feuerbach.

Despite its limitations, The Essence of Christianity still retains considerable interest for its brilliant insights into the social and historical roots of religion. Feuerbach regards religion as the alienation of man, in which human traits are made objective and treated as a supernatural being. It is as if man suffers from a kind of split personality, and contemplates his own essence in God. For Feuerbach, the central problem of alienation is religious – in worshipping God, men and women worship their own alienated being:

Man – and this is the secret of religion – objectifies his being, and then again makes himself the object of this objectified being, transformed into a subject, a person. He is an object to another being.^[8]

This idea was undoubtedly correct, but left completely out of account the real mainspring and origin of all alienation – the alienation of labour from itself in the form of surplus value in the process of capitalist production. Through their collective labour, the workers create an alien power – capital – which confronts them and enslaves them. In Feuerbach’s writings, Man appears in a one-sided, abstract and unreal manner. The real, historical men and women only appear with the advent of Marxist philosophy.

The problem with Feuerbach and some other Left Hegelians (Moses Hess) is that he merely said no to Hegel, negating his philosophy by simply denying it. His main mistake was, to use the German expression, to throw the baby out with the bath water. In rejecting Hegel’s philosophy, he also rejected its rational core – dialectics. This explains the one-sided character of Feuerbach’s materialism, which caused its downfall.

Feuerbach paid a heavy price for his radical views. He was persecuted savagely by the authorities. Dismissed from the university in 1830, he spent his last years a tragic and virtually forgotten figure in an obscure village. Somebody once remarked that the saddest phrase in any language is ‘might have been’. This is truer of Feuerbach than any other philosopher. Having spent the greater part of his life in the wilderness, in the end, his destiny, like a philosophical John the Baptist, was to prepare the way for others. His defence of materialism paved the way for the philosophical revolution carried out by Marx and Engels. His most important role was to act as a catalyst for the new movement.

The revolution of 1848 consigned the ideas of Feuerbach and the Hegelian Left to oblivion. Ideas which had seemed radical before now appeared irrelevant. Only the revolutionary programme of Marx and Engels stood the test of fire. Feuerbach did not understand the revolution, and remained aloof from the new movement founded by Marx and Engels, although, to his credit, at the end of his life he joined the German Social Democratic Party.

AN EXTRAORDINARY COLLABORATION

When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time.^[9]

These few words by Engels mark the beginning of one of the most famous and extraordinarily fruitful collaborations of all time, the one between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For many years, the enemies of Marxism (and even some who pretend to be Marxists) have attempted to drive a wedge between these two giants. They have tried by all manner of means to ‘prove’ that what Engels wrote, for example, in the field of philosophy, was not what Marx believed, and so on, and so forth.

This stupid falsification is instantly disproved by even the most cursory reading of the voluminous correspondence between the two men, which fills nine bulky volumes of the Marx-Engels Collected Works (English edition), dating from 1844 right up to Marx’s death in 1883. These letters show just how closely the two men worked together, and how they jointly worked out and developed the theories of scientific socialism. Since both Marx and Engels were extremely scrupulous in all matters pertaining to theory, neither would ever allow any differences to pass without comment. But no serious differences are to be found. The only disagreement arose on questions of a secondary or tactical nature, such as which side would eventually emerge victorious in the American Civil War.

Such matters did not reveal any serious differences between Marx and Engels, either on theoretical principles or methodology. So closely identified were their ideas that Marx often asked Engels to write articles in his (Marx’s) name. This close collaboration – cemented by a lifelong personal friendship – commenced when the two young men threw themselves eagerly into the battle of ideas, crossing swords with the Young Hegelians, but also pointing out the limitations and deficiencies of Feuerbach’s ideas.

The united front of Marx and Engels immediately bore fruit with the publication of one of the seminal works of Marxist philosophy, The Holy Family, or the Critique of Critical Criticism, written between September and November 1844 and first published in February 1845. It dealt a mortal blow to the Left Hegelians.

Marx and Engels subjected the philosophical ideas of the Left Hegelians to a withering criticism, spiced with the most biting irony. They demolished the subjective idealist conception of self-consciousness, explaining that sensuously perceived reality exists irrespective of the consciousness of the observer. They pointed out that the world continues to exist even when the subject is not present to perceive it. That is something that most people accept without question. But philosophers are a strange breed, and the subjective idealists are stranger than most. Of Bruno Bauer, they wrote that he is “transforming the world outside himself into an appearance, a mere fancy of his brain, and afterwards declaring this fantasy to be what it really is, i.e., a mere fantasy”.^[10]

They pointed out that subjective idealism inevitably ended up in extreme individualism, the elevation of the individual hero as the mainspring of history, and a contemptuous rejection of the role of the masses as a historical agent. On this they wrote: “Critical criticism, by lumping humanity together in a spiritless mass, gives the most striking proof how infinitely small real human beings seem to speculation.”^[11] On 1 August 1844, Marx wrote to Feuerbach about the Literatur-Zeitung, the monthly magazine of Bruno Bauer:

In his critical Berlin Literatur-Zeitung, Bruno Bauer, my friend of many years standing – but now rather estranged – has provided fresh proof of how difficult it is for Germans to extricate themselves from the contrary one-sidedness. I don’t know if you have read the journal. It contains much covert polemic against you.

The character of the Literatur-Zeitung can be reduced to the following: “Criticism” is transformed into a transcendental being. These Berliners do not regard themselves as men who criticise, but as critics who, incidentally, have the misfortune of being men. They therefore acknowledge only one real need, the need of theoretical criticism. People like Proudhon are therefore accused of having made some “practical” “need” their point of departure. This criticism therefore lapses into a sad and supercilious intellectualism. Consciousness or self-consciousness is regarded as the only human quality.^[12]

Marx quotes Bauer’s view that philosophy, or rather, ‘criticism’, to use the Young Hegelian jargon, should not display feeling or passion. Bauer says literally:

The critic should participate neither in the sufferings nor in the joys of society; he should know neither friendship and love, nor hate and envy; he should be enthroned in a solitude, where only the laughter of the Olympian Gods over the topsy-turviness of the world resounds occasionally from his lips.^[13]

Marx goes on to say:

Love, for example, is rejected because the loved one is only an “object”. Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted with the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sophos.^[14]

This criticism of ‘Critical Criticism’ is systematically developed in The Holy Family, where Marx and Engels prove that Bauer’s subjectivist philosophy merely carries to a logical end the basic idea of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: the substance must rise to self-consciousness.

Instead of these lifeless abstractions, the founders of scientific socialism proceeded from real, material men and women in society, real history, not the spirit world of idealist ‘Self-Consciousness’.

MARX’S REVOLUTION IN PHILOSOPHY

Marx’s materialism had nothing in common with the old mechanical (‘metaphysical’) materialism. In fact, it owed an immense debt to Hegel. But whereas the latter had turned the real relation between subject and object on its head, Marx inverted the relation, placing it once more with its feet firmly on material grounds.

On 20 August 1859, in an article on Hegel in Das Volk, No. 16, Engels wrote a brief but highly illuminating account of the philosophical revolution carried out by Karl Marx:

Since Hegel’s death hardly any attempt has been made to develop any branch of science in its specific inner coherence. The official Hegelian school had assimilated only the most simple devices of the master’s dialectics and applied them to everything and anything, often with ridiculous incompetence. Hegel’s whole legacy was, so far as they were concerned, limited to a mere template, by means of which any subject could be shaped aright, and to a list of words and phrases whose only purpose was to turn up at the right moment, when ideas and positive knowledge were lacking. Thus it happened, as a professor at Bonn has said, that these Hegelians understood nothing but could write about everything. And that is what it came to. For all their conceit these gentlemen were, however, sufficiently conscious of their weakness to avoid major problems as far as possible. The old pedantic learning held its ground because of its superior positive knowledge, and then with Feuerbach’s renunciation of the speculative method, Hegelianism gradually fell asleep, and it seemed that science was once more dominated by the old metaphysics with its fixed categories…

Here there was, therefore, a question to be solved which was not connected with political economy as such. How was science to be dealt with? There was, on the one hand, the Hegelian dialectic in the quite abstract, “speculative” form in which Hegel had left it, and on the other hand the ordinary, essentially Wolffian, metaphysical method, which had again come into vogue and which was used by bourgeois economists to write their bulky rambling volumes. The second method had been theoretically so demolished by Kant and particularly by Hegel that its continued use in practice could only be rendered possible by inertia and the absence of an alternative simple method. The Hegelian method, on the other hand, was in its existing form quite inapplicable. It was essentially idealist, while the task here was to elaborate a world outlook more materialist than any previous one. Hegel’s method took as its point of departure pure thought, whereas here the starting point was to be inexorable facts. A method which, according to its own avowal, “came from nothing through nothing to nothing” was in this shape by no means suitable. It was, nevertheless, the only element among the entire available logical material which could at least serve as a point of departure. It had not been subjected to criticism, had not been overthrown; none of the opponents of the great dialectician had been able to make a breach in its proud edifice. It has been forgotten because the Hegelian school did not know how to apply it. Hence, it was first of all essential to subject the Hegelian method to thoroughgoing criticism.

What distinguished Hegel’s mode of thinking from that of all other philosophers was the exceptional historical sense underlying it. However abstract and idealist the form employed, the development of his ideas runs always parallel to the development of world history, and the latter is indeed supposed to be only the proof of the former. Although this reversed the actual relation and stood it on its head, yet the real content was invariably incorporated in his philosophy, especially since Hegel – unlike his pupils – did not rely on ignorance, but was one of the most erudite thinkers of all time. He was the first to try to demonstrate that there is development, an intrinsic coherence in history, and however strange some things in his philosophy of history may seem to us now, the grandeur of the basic conception is still admirable today, compared with either his predecessors or those who following him ventured to advance general observations on history. This monumental conception of history pervades the Phenomenology, the Aesthetics and the History of Philosophy, and the material is everywhere set forth historically, in a definite historical context even if in an abstract distorted manner.

This epoch-making conception of history was the direct theoretical precondition of the new materialist outlook, and already this constituted a connecting link with the logical method as well. Since, even from the standpoint of “pure thinking”, this forgotten dialectics had led to such results, and had moreover with the greatest ease coped with the whole of the former logic and metaphysics, there had, at all events, to be more to it than sophistry and hair-splitting. But criticism of this method, which the entire official philosophy had evaded and still evades, was no small matter.

Marx was and is the only one who could undertake the work of extracting from the Hegelian logic the kernel containing Hegel’s real discoveries in this field, and of establishing the dialectical method, divested of its idealist wrappings, in the simple form in which it becomes the only correct mode of the development of thought. The working out of the method which underlies Marx’s critique of political economy is, we think, a result hardly less significant than the basic materialist outlook.^[15]

THE THESES ON FEUERBACH

Perhaps the most important of the early writings of Marx were the Theses on Feuerbach. They were an important step on the way to breaking with the one-sided materialism of Feuerbach and striking out in a new direction. These few concentrated sentences contain a philosophical revolution. Let us begin with the first thesis:

The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things, reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity, as such.^[16]

This phrase of Marx has often caused a certain puzzlement. Its meaning is not immediately clear, nor can it be made clear unless we place it in the context of the history of philosophy. Yet the idea contained within it is the starting point for the development of dialectical materialism, and of Marxism in general.

The old materialism was one-sided in that it considered human thought in a static, passive and contemplative way. Man was merely an observer of nature, taking note of ‘the facts’:

The mind to it is in itself void, a mere mirror of the external world, a dark room into which the images of the things without fall, without any contribution or action on its part; its entire contents are due to the impressions made on it by material things.^[17]

The early, mechanical materialism was unable to solve this problem and arrive at a scientific understanding of the real relationship between subject and object. This is what Marx deals with in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. The early materialism was limited by the level achieved by the science of the day, which was very rigid and mechanical in nature (Engels referred to it as the ‘metaphysical outlook’, although we use the word metaphysics differently today).

Mechanics sees the relation between subject and object in a simplistic, static and one-sided way: pushing, pulling, lifting, inertia, levers, pulleys etc. All motion is imparted from without. Newton’s mechanical universe required the Almighty to give it a push to set it in motion, but after that it worked perfectly, like clockwork. The relationship was passive and one-sided.

In this clockwork universe, there is little or no room for subjective activity and creative initiative. Every action is predetermined by Nature’s Eternal Laws. By contrast, the idealists exaggerated the role of the subject, seeing it as all-important. They even derived the existence of the object from the subject.

The conception of the activity of the subject was contained and developed by the objective idealist, Hegel. That is what Marx meant when he said that the subjective element was developed by the idealists, not the materialists. It was the bringing together of the two elements, the concept of activity of the subject of the idealists and the notion of the objectivity of the material world, which was the key to solving the problem.

THE SECOND THESIS

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.^[18]

The problem of knowledge (epistemology) has occupied a central place in philosophy for centuries. But this so-called problem only arises when human knowledge is regarded a) as something separate from a physical body, and b) as something separate from the material world.

Marx and Engels exposed the false premises that lie at the roots of the epistemology of idealism. It is really a kind of swindle that begins by separating the general definition of individual things from their concrete reality and then proceeds to present the general definition as the source and the prime cause of the objects of sensory perception.

For instance, the general concept ‘fruit’ is separated from real fruits, and declared to be the true substance of pears, apples and oranges. From the standpoint of speculative idealism, the distinction between apples, pears and oranges is immaterial. But in actual life, that is not at all the case. Nobody has ever eaten an abstract ‘fruit’, but only apples, oranges and so on. Engels pointed out that a mineralogist who confined himself to stating that all minerals are modifications of “the Mineral in general”, instead of studying their real qualitative distinctions, “would be a mineralogist only in his imagination.”^[19]

But does that mean that abstractions are of no value, that they are merely the arbitrary products of our imagination? Not at all! Abstract thought is a most powerful tool for penetrating the secrets of nature and enabling human beings to gain mastery over it. In defining the nature of things, we can arrive at their hidden essence, the general traits that give them their specific identity. Without such abstract generalisations, rational thought would be impossible. In fact, as Hegel pointed out, it would be impossible even to utter the simplest sentence (Mary is a woman, this is a house, Fido is a dog) without turning a particular into a universal.

Yet the abstractions of thought did not drop from the clouds. They are all ultimately derived from observation of material things and experience of the real world, and would have absolutely no value unless they closely corresponded to the real, material world. This process has taken place over a very long time – so long, in fact, that the real origins of human thought and language have long sunk into oblivion.

Long before men and women developed the idea of a circle, they had observed a countless number of round objects: the sun, the moon, a tree trunk cut in half and so on. From these observations, eventually we arrive at the idea of ‘roundness’, and hence a circle. Nobody has ever seen an abstract circle in real life, because such a thing has never existed and never will exist. The idealists conceive of abstractions as if they had real existence. The material world for them is merely a crude and imperfect imitation of the Idea. In reality, it is the other way around. As Aristotle, ‘the great definer’, pointed out long ago: “But of course, there cannot be a house in general, apart from particular houses.”

THE RATIONAL KERNEL OF HEGEL

It was left to Marx and Engels to carry Hegel’s criticism of Kant to its logical conclusion – a complete break with idealism. But whereas Feuerbach rejected Hegel’s ideas in their totality, Marx and Engels understood that the Hegelian philosophy contained a very important truth: the dialectic. In Hegel, the dialectic remained obscured, its profound truths hidden in a mass of abstract and abstruse reasoning. Stripped of its mystical and idealist wrapping and placed on a sound scientific (materialist) basis, Hegel’s dialectic provided the starting point for a real philosophical revolution.

It required the genius of a Marx to discover the rational kernel that lay hidden in the pages of Hegel’s Logic and apply it to the real, material world. He also explained that the deficiency of Feuerbach’s “anthropological materialism” is that here the individual is conceived of as an abstract entity. But real human activity (labour) is not the activity of isolated individuals. It is necessarily collective in its very essence.

The problem of the relation between subject and object (thought and being) was finally resolved by Marx, who pointed out that, ultimately, all the problems of philosophy are resolved in practice: “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”^[20] Materialism rejects the notion that mind, consciousness, soul etc., is something separate from matter. Thought is merely the mode of existence of the brain, which, like life itself, is only matter organised in a certain way. Mind is what we call the sum total of the activity of the brain and the nervous system. But, dialectically, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The idealists persist in presenting consciousness as a ‘mystery’, something that we cannot comprehend. Hiding behind this stubborn attempt to place an absolute limit on what mere mortals are allowed to know lurks the murky spirit world of religious superstition and all the rest of the wretched mumbo-jumbo that science ought to have consigned to a museum long ago. Despite everything, science continues its onward march, tearing down one by one, all the old mysteries and forcing religion to retreat, step by step, loudly protesting its right to exist.

The materialist view corresponds closely to the conclusions of science, which is gradually uncovering the workings of the brain and revealing its secrets. And there is no final limit to this process of human development. What we do not know today, we are sure we shall know tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. The final truth of materialism is provided, not by abstract debates in university seminar rooms, but by social development and the history of science. Humankind does not merely contemplate nature but actively transforms it, and this ceaseless productive activity is what demonstrates the correctness or otherwise of ideas, as Engels explains:

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical quirks is practice, namely, experimentation and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural phenomenon by bringing it about ourselves, producing it out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then the ungraspable Kantian “thing-in-itself” is finished. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us…^[21]

SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM

A further complication arises when we reach the stage of subjective idealism, which emerged as a definite trend with Berkeley and Hume and passed into the philosophy of Kant, where it continued to cause endless confusion. Kant was a philosopher of stature. His great merit was to subject the traditional forms of logic to a thoroughgoing criticism. But his Achilles’ heel was to be found in his subjectivist position on the theory of knowledge, which he unfortunately took over from the vulgar empiricist David Hume.

Here was the source of his main weaknesses – ambiguity, inconsistency and agnosticism. As has been explained, in failing to make a clean break with the traditional logic, while exposing its limitations, Kant landed himself in all kinds of insoluble contradictions (antinomies), which he left unresolved. In Kant’s theory of knowledge we have a one-sided view of consciousness, which is presented as a barrier that is supposed to shut us off from the ‘external’ world. In fact, we are part of this world, not separate from it, and consciousness does not separate us but connects us to it. The relationship of humans to the physical world from the very beginning was not contemplative but active. As the great German Poet Goethe said: “Am anfang war die Tat!” – In the beginning was the Deed!

We do not only think with our brain, but with our whole body. Thinking must be seen, not as an isolated activity (“the ghost in the machine”, as Gilbert Ryle caricatured René Descartes’ dualist theory of mind and body)^[22] but as part of the whole human experience, of human sensuous activity and interaction with the world and with other people. The act of thinking must be seen as part of this complex process of permanent interaction, not as an isolated activity that is mechanically juxtaposed to it. The great genius Hegel came close to discovering the truth, but despite his colossal intellectual power, he failed to make the decisive leap from theory to practice, blinded as he was by his idealist preconceptions.

Kant’s subjective idealism had been thoroughly demolished by Hegel from the standpoint of objective idealism. But it raised its head once more after the death of the great man and, in one disguise or another, has been the dominant trend in bourgeois philosophy ever since. It received a definitive answer in the second of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. The arguments of subjective idealism and the subject-object problem can only be thoroughly demolished when we adopt the standpoint of practice and approach the theory of knowledge from a concrete historical point of view, and not from the standpoint of empty and static abstraction.

In embryo, the elements of this dialectical conception are already present in Hegel. What Marx did was strip it of its idealist disguise, and express it in a clear and scientific manner. Hegel says in The History of Philosophy that “the being of mind is its act, and its act is to be aware of itself.” But in Hegel, thinking is not merely a contemplative activity. The highest form of thought, which he calls Reason, does not merely accept the given facts, but works upon them and transforms them.

The contradiction between thought and being, between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, is overcome in Hegel through the process of knowledge itself, which penetrates ever deeper into the objective world. In Hegel, however, instead of genuine human men and women we have the abstraction of Self-Consciousness. The real struggle of historical forces is expressed in the shadowy form of the struggle of ideas. No further progress was possible without a complete break with Hegelian idealism. This transition was accomplished by Marx and Engels after their break with the abstract materialism of Feuerbach.

THE ‘ALGEBRA OF REVOLUTION’

The nineteenth century Russian revolutionary democrat Alexander Herzen once described the dialectic as the “algebra of revolution”.^[23] When Marx and Engels freed the rational kernel of Hegel’s philosophy from its idealist prison, they transformed dialectics into a powerful weapon for revolutionary action:

Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thinking – two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the Hegelian dialectic was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. And this materialist dialectic, which for years was our best means of labour and our sharpest weapon…^[24]

THE THIRD THESIS ON FEUERBACH

In his third thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.^[25]

Here at last thought is united with activity – not the one-sided purely intellectual activity of the scholar but real, sensuous human activity. But this inevitably leads us to revolutionary conclusions. From the standpoint of materialism, the development of men and women is determined by the material conditions of their existence. This is really a self-evident proposition, even when we take into consideration the genetic element that undoubtedly has a role to play in this development.

The biological accidents of birth provide the basic raw material for the physical and mental development of individual men and women. But it is objective circumstances that will ultimately decide the way in which this development proceeds. Albert Einstein was a genius, and it is not excluded that his genius would have sooner or later expressed itself in one way or another, independently of the conditions of his life. But if he had been born the son of a landless labourer in an Indian village, would his genius have realised its full potential?

He may have acquired an impressive level of skills in the planting of rice or perhaps even risen to the rank of a village artisan. Maybe, or maybe not. But would he have developed the theory of relativity that transformed science in the twentieth century? The question answers itself. The mere assertion that material conditions determine the lives of men and women does not exhaust the matter. If the material conditions of the masses constitute an insuperable obstacle that prevents millions of people from realising their true potential as human beings, if it suffocates that creative spark that exists in every individual, to one extent or another, then it follows that these objective conditions must be changed.

The argument that is frequently advanced by reformists to counter the idea of revolution is that it is necessary to ‘educate the masses’. Sometimes one even hears a variant of the same false idea expressed by so-called Marxists. They try to explain the absence of a successful socialist revolution by referring to the alleged ‘immaturity’ of the masses, who are not yet worthy to carry out a revolution, presumably because they have not yet read the three volumes of Marx’s Capital! In order to succeed, the workers must gather round the rostrum of the sectarians who will ‘educate’ them and eventually present them with a Certificate of Maturity. Armed with this portentous document, the masses could then proceed to take power the very next morning at precisely nine o’clock.

Answering this ridiculous nonsense, Marx pointed out wittily, it is not the masses who need such a certificate, but precisely the ‘educators’ who need educating. These sophistical arguments are merely a cunning and cynical defence of the status quo. For it is precisely the objective conditions of life under capitalism that constitute an impenetrable barrier between the mass of the population and access to culture.

Society is divided into ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers’, which the Bible describes as “the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.”^[26] Contempt for manual labour is at once a reflection of bourgeois prejudice and an attempt to justify the structures, morals and values of bourgeois society, a society in which the Ego (the ‘individual’) is said to rule supreme. The mainspring of human history is presented as the actions and volition of individual protagonists, whether heroes or villains.

In reality, however, the individuality of the great majority is crushed and enslaved to the individuality of a tiny handful that own and control the means of production and thus the key to life itself. And to tell the whole truth, even this minority is subject to forces that they do not control. Although the masses who create the wealth of society make up the overwhelming majority of humankind, they have no history and no name; their voices are silenced and their existence largely ignored. For over 10,000 years, society has been dominated by a tiny privileged minority that has held in its hands a monopoly on culture.

Marx explained that social being determines consciousness. In order to change people, it is necessary to change their conditions of existence. But how is society to be changed? That is the question! A fundamental change in society cannot be achieved by passive contemplation or endless speculative discussions in the philosophy departments of universities, but only by the collective revolutionary action of the oppressed masses themselves. And the masses do not learn from books, but from the concrete experience of the class struggle.

THE EIGHTH THESIS ON FEUERBACH: TOWARDS THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.^[27]

These words represent a decisive break with the past. They are a recognition of the need to develop an entirely new way of thinking: a new type of philosophy that was, in effect, a non-philosophical theory.

From a materialist point of view, thinking is not an isolated activity, but is inseparable from human existence in general. Marx says that labour, material production, is man’s species-life. That is to say, labour is the mode of existence of human beings. This specific distinction of man from animal is not a natural one, but emerges and develops in the process of production throughout human history, from the fashioning of the first crude stone axes to the building of computers, robots and space travel.

Humankind develops thought through concrete, sensuous activity – not merely intellectual activity, but collective human labour. By transforming the material world through labour, men and women also transform themselves and, in so doing, develop and extend the horizon of their thinking. The power of labour lies in the combination of the efforts, strivings and creativity of a vast number of individual men and women. It is this magical combination that gives rise to all the wonders of civilisation.

In the power of human labour, we see the concrete realisation of what Hegel called the unity of the Particular and the Universal. Yet this necessary unity has been stubbornly denied. The thoughts and actions of humankind are presented, not as a collective activity, but as the work of isolated individuals. Behind this one-sided view lies a deep-seated prejudice that elevates mental labour to the most important, if not the sole element in human progress, while the role of manual labour is relegated to insignificance.

The enslavement of one class by another does not originate with capitalism. It has existed in different forms for thousands of years, a fact that Marx and Engels examined in great detail in their writings on historical materialism. The outlines of this theory are already seen in The German Ideology (notably in the first chapter entitled ‘Feuerbach’). It finally emerges in a finished form in one of the greatest and most influential documents in world history: The Communist Manifesto, which for the first time places human history on a scientific basis, starting with a bold statement: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”.^[28]

And it ends with a stirring proclamation:

Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workers of All Countries, Unite! ^[29]

A PERIOD OF DECLINE

For the past one-and-a-half centuries, the realm of philosophy has resembled an arid desert with only the occasional trace of life. The age of giants has passed away without trace. The treasure trove of the past, with its ancient glories and flashes of illumination, has vanished. Its fire is utterly extinguished. This desert that still calls itself philosophy is inhabited by a tribe of eunuchs and squabbling pygmies. In this intellectual wasteland one would search in vain for any source of illumination.

The complete emptiness of modern bourgeois philosophy is something that has been increasingly noted, even by the philosophers themselves. Peter Unger spent decades working as a celebrated analytic philosopher at the University of New York, having been tutored by the guru of that philosophy, A. J Ayer. What conclusion did he finally draw?

In 2014 he published a book with the interesting title, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. In an article defending the book, he states the following:

[D]uring the last five decades, there has been offered hardly any new thoughts whose truth, or whose untruth, makes or means any difference as to how anything ever is as concern [sic] concrete reality, except for ever so many perfectly parochial thoughts, ideas about nothing much more than which words are used by which people, and how various of these people use these words of theirs – and nothing any deeper than that.^[30]

I would only add that the same thing can be said of every other product of modern bourgeois philosophy, and for a period considerably longer than five decades.

The constant semantic fiddling and fussing about the meaning of words resembles a dog that never tires of chasing its own tail. It calls to mind the convoluted debates of the medieval Schoolmen who argued endlessly over the sex of angels, and how many can dance on the head of a pin. It is hard to say what is worse: the intolerable pretensions of so-called postmodernism, or the obvious emptiness of its content. The fact that this tedious playing with words could be given the name of philosophy at all is proof of how far modern bourgeois thought has declined.

Hegel wrote in the Phenomenology: “By the little with which the human spirit is satisfied, we can judge the extent of its loss.” That would be a fitting epitaph for all the bourgeois philosophy after Hegel and Feuerbach. Bourgeois philosophy has long ago entered into the stage of senility where it is only capable of incoherent babbling and constant wearisome repetition of old stories that no longer evoke any reaction other than a sense of irritation and boredom. It is, to quote Shakespeare: Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

The beginning of the new spirit is the product of a wide-ranging revolution in various forms of culture, the reward of a complicated, tortuous journey and of an equally immense and strenuous effort. The beginning is the whole that has returned into itself from succession as well as extension, the resultant simple concept of the whole. But the actuality of this simple whole consists in this: these configurations that have become moments again develop anew and take on a configuration, but now in their new element, in the sense that has emerged.^[31]

We now arrive at a final parting of the ways. We have followed all the vicissitudes of philosophy over two-and-a-half millennia. We have participated in its triumphs and its failures. We have had occasion to marvel at the colossal achievements of the human intellect and admire the astonishing sweep and boldness of its vision. We have been in the presence of some of the greatest thinkers who have ever lived. But now the history of philosophy has run its course, and having done so, returns once again to its starting point.

Philosophy, as we have seen, commences with the Greeks. The early Ionian philosophers were materialists who believed that material objects possessed life, or rather that matter is invested with a kind of innate life force, or energy. That is the exact meaning of hylozoism. It is what Thales meant when he said that all things are full of gods (daimon). All the early Greek philosophers taught that there is a form of life in all material objects. They regarded the magnet as alive because of its attractive powers. This apparently showed that matter possessed the inherent power of movement. This astonishing insight anticipated the discoveries of modern science by two-and-a-half millennia.

It would seem that we have completed a great circle and have now returned to our point of departure. But the evolution of thought and science is not an endless circle, but rather a spiral, in which one theory negates another, while retaining all that was viable and progressive in the earlier stages. Philosophy in the old sense of the word has said everything worthwhile that it had to say. It has served its purpose, and in so doing, it has exhausted all the progressive potential that it once possessed. Philosophy today is only a pitiful shadow of its former self.

This is no accident. The great mysteries over which it used to ponder have been largely solved by the discoveries of science, which prefers the trusty weapons of experiment and observation to the useless pastimes of empty speculation and mystification. The materialism of the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers was a brilliant anticipation, but it was really in the nature of an inspired guess. They lacked the necessary scientific proof for their assertions, because the productive forces had not yet reached the level required to furnish such proofs. We do not have to return to the fantastic theories of Thales, Anaximander and Heraclitus, because we have at our disposal all the wealth of information provided by the march of science over many decades and centuries.

A NEW DEPARTURE

Precisely at this point we have arrived at an entirely new point of departure, a fundamental parting of the ways with all previous philosophy. It finds its expression in what is perhaps the greatest and most important of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: the celebrated eleventh thesis. These words, which have echoed like a clarion call down the ages, are like a breath of fresh air. At long last, philosophy finally emerges out of the dark and airless cellar to which it was confined for centuries by scholastic speculation and is dragged, blinking, into the light of day.

Here philosophical thought – the highest, most sublime achievement of the human spirit – for the first time ceases to be merely a contemplative activity and becomes a formidable weapon in the struggle to change society. We have now left the dimly lit study of the philosopher, and stepped out into the broad daylight of human life, activity and struggle. Finally, philosophy ceases to be a monopoly of a privileged handful of thinkers. It becomes in practice what it always was in potential.

Marx pointed out that ideas in themselves have no history and no real existence. They fight no battles and win no victories. The real battles of history are fought by men and women. And in most circumstances, they are moved in the first instance, not by ideas alone, but by material circumstances. The instinctive, elemental revolutionary movement of the masses is the mainspring of the socialist revolution. But all history shows the limitation of spontaneous action.

In order to succeed, the working class must be armed with the necessary ideas, methods and programme. And Marx explained that ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of the masses. Here is where scientific thought ceases to be an idle occupation and joins hands with humanity – not the lifeless abstractions of “Self-Consciousness” or “World Spirits” or Feuerbach’s abstract anthropological construction, but real, breathing, living, struggling, fighting men and women. And we, the militant defenders of the new world outlook, while embracing all that was progressive, truthful and enduring in the philosophies of the past, proudly proclaim on our banner the words of Marx:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.^[32]

Endnotes

[1] J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 51, my emphasis.

[2] Ibid., p. 51.

[3] L. Feuerbach, Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, The Fiery Book, p. 168.

[4] L. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, The Fiery Brook, p. 206.

[5] Ibid., pp. 202-3.

[6] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, MECW, Vol. 26, p. 364.

[7] L. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, The Fiery Brook, p. 198.

[8] L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Chapter 1.

[9] F. Engels, ‘On the History of the Communist League’, MECW, Vol. 26, p. 318.

[10] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, MECW, Vol. 4, p. 140.

[11] Ibid., p. 40.

[12] K. Marx, ‘Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach, 11 August 1844’, MECW, Vol. 3, p. 356.

[13] Quoted ibid., p. 356.

[14] Ibid., p. 356.

[15] F. Engels, ‘Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, MECW, Vol. 16, pp. 472-5.

[16] K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 3.

[17] A. Schwegler, Handbook of the History of Philosophy, pp. 180-1.

[18] K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 3.

[19] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, MECW, Vol. 4, p. 58.

[20] K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 3.

[21] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, MECW, Vol. 26, pp. 367-8.

[22] See G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind.

[23] A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, p. 237.

[24] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, MECW, Vol. 26, p. 383.

[25] K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 4.

[26] Joshua 9:21.

[27] K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 5.

[28] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Classics of Marxism Volume One, p. 3.

[29] Ibid., p. 35.

[30] P. Unger, ‘A Taste of Empty Ideas’, 3 Quarks Daily, 30 June 2014.

[31] G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 9.

[32] K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, MECW, Vol. 5, p. 5.