Marx’s Revolution in Philosophy: Reflections on the Theses on Feuerbach¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Alan Woods argues that Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach constitute a fundamental break with all previous philosophy, uniting thought with material, sensuous human activity for the first time. The core of this revolution is contained in the third thesis, where Marx insists that changing circumstances and human self-change can only be grasped as revolutionary practice. Woods presents this as the resolution of a centuries-old philosophical impasse.
The chapter grounds its argument in a materialist account of consciousness. Woods rejects the idealist and dualist traditions stemming from Plato, Pythagoras, and Descartes, which treat mind as a separate entity—a “ghost in the machine” locked inside a mortal body. Against this, he draws on modern neuroscience to describe consciousness as the electrochemical activity of the brain and nervous system, part of the body’s continuous interaction with the material world. This scientific evidence, he claims, banishes the mystical notion of an immortal soul.
The decisive factor in the evolution of human consciousness, Woods argues, was not the brain but the hand. Drawing on Engels and anthropological evidence, he traces how the erect stance freed the hands for manual labor, tool-making, and increasingly complex operations. This practical activity drove the growth of the brain and the development of language, which arose spontaneously from collective social production. Consciousness is thus not a contemplative barrier between humans and the world but an active, social product of labour.
Woods’s polemic is directed against bourgeois individualism in all its forms. He attacks the notion of the isolated, freely choosing individual as a reflection of capitalist social relations, which atomise and alienate people. The bourgeois epoch, once progressive, has degenerated into mere egotism and inhumanity. By contrast, the working class, compelled to cooperate in collective production, naturally develops a collective consciousness. The strike, the mass meeting, and the general strike are its characteristic weapons; individualism is the hallmark of the strikebreaker.
The chapter also takes aim at postmodernism, which Woods dismisses as vacuous platitudes reflecting the irrationality of an alienated world. He cites the popularity of disaster films and the Terminator franchise as cultural symptoms of a society where people feel displaced by forces beyond their control, where things dominate humans. The only way to abolish this alienation, he concludes, is to abolish its material base—capitalist relations of production—and establish a rational, planned economy. Only through revolutionary practice, the unity of changing circumstances and self-change, can humanity end its prehistory and live as genuinely free men and women.