Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Excerpts)¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Excerpts)¶
Marxism is presented as an integral world outlook, the highest stage of contemporary materialism, with its historical and economic aspects—historical materialism—being almost entirely the work of Marx and Engels. Their precursors merely amassed unsystematised material. Attempts to ‘supplement’ Marxism with philosophers like Kant or Mach are arbitrary, as Marx and Engels did set forth their philosophical views, notably in Engels’s Anti-Dühring and Ludwig Feuerbach, and in Marx’s preface to Capital and The Poverty of Philosophy. Their early writings show Marx initially as a Hegelian idealist, then an adherent of Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’. Feuerbach’s philosophy is materialist, not vague: he argued that being is the subject and thinking the predicate, resolving the contradiction between them by starting from the actual, material ‘I and you’ rather than the abstract ‘I’. Feuerbach’s ‘humanism’ is Spinozism freed of its theological pendant—materialism brought up to date. Marx and Engels adopted this view when breaking with idealism. Marx later criticised Feuerbach for conceiving reality only as object or contemplation, not as human sensuous activity or practice.
Marx’s epistemology corrects Feuerbach’s by recognising that man is induced to think chiefly by sensations experienced while acting upon the outer world, a process prescribed by the struggle for existence. This links the theory of knowledge to the materialist view of history. Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels shared the doctrine of the unity of subject and object, thinking and being, a position also held by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialists like La Mettrie, Diderot, and Hobbes. Modern naturalists like Huxley, Haeckel, and Forel approach this same materialist position, though often less clearly. Materialism recognises the unity of subject and object, not their identity. For Feuerbach, this unity makes sense only with man as its basis: thinking is not a subject for itself but the predicate of a real, material being. The Theses on Feuerbach correct rather than eliminate his fundamental propositions. The materialist explanation of history applies Feuerbach’s principle that being determines thinking. Marx’s sixth Thesis defines the human essence as the ensemble of social relations. The materialist explanation of history was primarily of methodological significance.
Marx and Engels’s key materialist contribution was developing a correct dialectical method, which Feuerbach neglected. Marx placed Hegel’s idealist dialectic on a materialist foundation: the ideal is the material world reflected by the human mind, not vice versa. Dialectics differs from vulgar evolutionism, which denies leaps. Hegel showed that change occurs through the interruption of gradualness, a transition of quantity into quality. Marx and Engels fully adopted this, applying it to nature and history; Engels demonstrated that leaps are inevitable in energy transformations and chemistry. This view is now gaining ground in biology, for instance in de Vries’s mutation theory. Marx’s materialist dialectic is inherently critical and revolutionary, recognising the inevitable negation of any existing state. It is a scandal to the bourgeoisie, whose class interests oppose it, leading to a “conventional lie” among scholars who denounce materialism while using it in practice. Seligman’s attempt to separate Marx’s economic views from his historical materialism is flawed; the two are inseparable. The struggle against materialism uses Kantian dualism, which severs being and thinking. Engels’s “leap” from necessity to freedom is misunderstood by Kantians: freedom consists in control founded on knowledge of natural necessity. Submission to conditional necessity is a source of liberation. Freedom lies in willing nothing but oneself; the proletariat, by reorganising production, will will only itself and feel free, while capitalists experience necessity as external coercion.
American Protestant theoreticians fail to grasp the freedom-necessity contraposition that preoccupies European bourgeois ideologists. H. Bargy notes that American energy theorists rarely recognise free will, attributing this to a preference for “fatalist solutions.” He is mistaken: fatalism is irrelevant. Bargy’s own remarks on Jonathan Edwards show that for a man of action, freedom is the capacity to devote one’s entire soul to a chosen aim—closely resembling Hegel’s “willing nothing but oneself.” This is not fatalism but