Karl Marx’s project is best encapsulated in one phrase of his: “So far philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways– but the point is to change it.” This emphasis on changing the world comes directly from his engagement with the dialectical logic of the philosopher Hegel, whose “interpretations” of the world held the most weight during Marx’s time. For those interested in a very cogent yet brief explanation of Hegel’s logic, Marx’s critique of it, and why it matters, I suggest the book Dialectical Materialism, written by the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre in 1939. In this note, I summarize some of the basic insights of this book.
Hegel’s dialectic proceeds as a formal system. It’s central tenant is this: conflicts and contradictions can be overcome. For Hegel, conflicts and contradictions harbor within themselves their own answers or resolutions. The work of the thinking Mind is to aquiesce to a higher movement of Mind, wherein opposites are seen wholly in relation, and then related to a higher moment, or “Third Term,” in which these opposites are ‘resolved.’ The simple characterization of Hegel’s philosophy goes like this: there is the thesis (position), there is the anti-thesis (negation), and there is then the synthesis (negation of the negation). Take the protypical example of the contradiction between Being and Nothingness. Being stands for the position of existence, and Nothingness stands for the negation of this position. But under the third term of “Becoming,” both the initial position and the negation are “negated and upheld” all at once. Being is seen to pass necessarily through its own nothingness, and nothingness is experienced to the point where nothingness “is”: and Becoming is the name that we then give to the process of Being passing through Nothingness, and Nothingness itself passing into Being. Notice that in this movement, there is not a simple negation of Being by Nothingness, or vice versa; it is what Hegel calls a “determinate negation” because a new positive content and a higher concept– Becoming– results from this negative, yet creative, movement. Further, there is essentially nothing but this movement: any attempt to hypostasize Being or Nothingness fails to see that, in this contradiction, there is nothing but “fruitful tension.” In this sense, both Being and Nothingness become relative moments of a higher movement of Mind. Through their incompatibility, there is transcendence.
What I’ve summarized here in terms of Being and Nothingness applies, for Hegel, to all categories and oppositions. Nothing can be asserted by itself (except the Idea and Absolute Knowledge): there are only ideal and abstract moments which are relative to a movement of transcendence in the Mind. Thus, dialectical logic claims to be both a method of analysis (of contradictions, conflicts in thought, etc.) and a recreation of the movement of the real itself (philosophical presentation of the dialectical system in its many moments). In it, the utmost abstractions are given a concrete meaning insofar as they are simply abstractions constituting moments of the whole. But it is thus that the whole operation of Hegel’s Logic is consumed with this negativity of Mind. Further, every content is consumed by this negativity of Mind: ”In every concrete content we have to discover the negation, the internal contradiction, the immanent movement, the positive and the negative” (Lefebvre). Hegel winds up with Absolute Knowledge as the final “Third Term” in which all tensions and contradictions are resolved. What is most egregious about this, however, is this: all contents are, in a sense, eaten up by the movement of Absolute Knowledge. Mind produces its own movement in negating every content; it triumph over all contents, finding a place only for itself. Nothing seems to remain but the philosopher basking in his Knowledge of the negativity of every content.
In light of this exposition, it is a bit easier to see the impetus behind Marx’s injunction to change the world, and not just interpret it. The simple question is this: what happens to the real content? In Hegel’s dialectic, everything from Terror to Religion, from Law to the State, have their moment. In its zeal to find a “spot” for everything, Mind appears to approve of everything, for everything is but a part of its movement of Knowing. But all of this seems to play a trick on Hegel. Where Mind thinks that it is appropriating real contents as moments of its formal movement toward Knowledge, what really seems to be the case is this: the Mind’s formal movement toward Knowledge is the “secret source” of the “real contents” it thought it was appropriating. In other words, and as astute as Hegel’s categories and thought really is, nothing develops here other than the Idea, divorced from any real content. The world itself is left as it is for the sake of this Conceptual Clarity of Mind, which is pressured to find in everything a moment of its transcendence.
Marx simply says this: the “content” of philosophical inquiry can’t just be a product of that inquiry; the “content” must be real. This trap is subtler than it would seem. Marx says essentially: thought must not impose systematic forms on the contents it finds; rather, it must analyse conflicts and contradictions that are found in the real content; and solutions must be found in accordance, not with the Mind’s Movement, but with the movement of the content that thought finds in its complexity. The forms must fit the imperative of content, not the content the imperative of form. The method is thus not purely formal, as is the case with Hegel; rather, it strives to become actual, material, and historical. Further, Marx’s method does not convince itself beforehand that everything will find its “right place,” that all contradictions will be resolved in the end in Absolute Knowing. Instead, we see come to the forefront of inquiry the contingent and historical content, with no assurance as to the resolution of historical conflicts (the epitome of this conflict in our historical age is that between social classes). Or, to put it simply: where Hegel hopes for a realization of Mind, Marx hopes for a realization of Man. Where Hegel wants to change consciousness (i.e., interpret the world anew), Marx wants to change human reality (i.e., change the world): “We must ignore philosophy and set ourselves as ordinary men to the study of the real, for which there exists an immense subject-matter that the philosophers naturally know nothing of.”
To do so, Marx looks to the forces of production– not only the production of material goods, but the production of consciousness itself. Consciousness, rather than being some ephemeral force of Mind, is a product of the relations between men and the sum of forces of production. This is why Marx can say, in a phrase as insightful as it is difficult to understand: “Consciousness does not determine life, life determines consciousness.” Better yet: “It is not consciousness that defines social-being, but our social-being that defines our consciousness.” (‘Hegel does not determine Marx, but Marx Hegel’) In Hegel’s elevation of consciousness as the limit-point of human reality, Marx sees the expression of the primordial engine of society’s creation: the division of mental and physical labor. The fact that Hegel could devise a system so encompassing of society as to see in all its “exterior realities” (Law, Religion, etc.) mere moments of the Mind attests to the depth of this division. While Hegel ostensibly sought to emancipate the isolated individual by bringing him into the movements of Absolute Knowledge, his system effectively attests to the alienated status of modern man. In pretending that the social whole is just an abstraction, he misses that his abstractions are ineffectual. The “actual concrete content” of the social totality goes unaffected aside from the marginal debates between interpretations of Hegel. Let me quote a few of Lefebvre’s most astute summaries of Marx’s real passion here:
Materialism seeks to give thought back its active force, the one which it had before consciousness became separated from work, when it was still linked directly with practice.
We have got to achieve a new stage of civilization and culture and enable man to realize his potentialities by altering the conditions of his existence.
The meaning of life lies in the full development of human possibilities, which are constricted and paralyzed not by nature but by the contradictory, class nature of social relations.
The contempt that Marx has for Hegel, at least initially, stems from the fact that abstraction (consciousness) MASKS the actual relations between men (social being); not only the brutality that class divisions breed in society, but the way that this brutality itself is masked. This is the classic distinction between superstructure and base (more basically: politics/discourse/language and economics/material relations). We need only recall that, even in 2011, basic economic plight is masked over by political banter (and as the current “debt crisis” shows, this political banter has REAL economic effects). This political banter (and its confusions), along with the technological and economic crises which accompany it, are really manifestations of the actual relationship between the masters of production (employers) and the everyday producer (workers) (while keeping in mind that, while they are manifestations of these underlying relations, they reciprocally effect these relations; Marxism is not an economic determinism). Thus, the key to a Marxist analysis would begin by trying to comprehend the abstract and “conscious” aspects of our current milieu in terms of how they mask the concrete and “social” aspects of the current state of production (its class inequalities, how it keeps us from our ownmost potentials, etc.).
The easiest way to portray all this is in terms of money. It appears to everyone that MONEY weighs on all social relations as if it were a foreign necessity placed on us from outside; but in point of fact, MONEY is just a manifestation of the real material relations between men. Think simply of the free market ideology which pretends that, if only the economy were unregulated and the free market let free, all would be well; not only has this never been proven empirically, and thus retains a kind of magical-religious aspect to it, but it would also seem that even more would be alienated from their real potentials insofar as the imperative to make money would be even stronger.
It is at this point that we’d need to delve into Marx’s critique of capitalism; I will leave that mostly for Lefebvre and those interested. I mention only one of Marx’s most radical assertions in closing: ”Money” is simply the fetishization of the whole of the processes of production. When we consume something, it is not so much that thing that we are consuming; what is really magic about a commodity is that it embodies the whole of production. We consume, in a sense, the totality of the relations of production in even the smallest Subway sandwich. We do not attend to this; but this attests to the extent of the mask. This is why Lefebvre writes, “The living individual is the prisoner of outside forces, but these are his forces, his objective content.” Part of Marxism is about liberating ourselves from the sway and “magic” of commodities: for it sees in all commodities a fetishization of the social whole. But only when this fetishization is pierced through are we liberated into the sphere of our ownmost productive activity: where our individual Becoming and the becoming-social of the Individual meet in practical activity. The strength of the analysis here is this: in attending to the material relations between men, rather than reifying the abstractions that mask them, there is the chance that humanity will escape the “economic destiny” that it seems to be doomed to (endless profit, idle consumption, increasing invisibility of class struggle, etc.). And on the “personal” level, there is the chance that we will not be “free for profit,” but rather “free from profit,” such that we can develop our potentialities as ends in themselves, no longer bent to the whims of an nameless Capital.
In turning toward actual content, the labor of thought escapes its own traps. The object of its labor is not thought itself, nor Absolute Knowing, but rather the actualization of a total humanity (for the one and for the many), where the relations between men is more transparent, and where labor (manual or mental) is no longer referenced to a goal separate from its own “spontaneous reason.” We are freed to work for the development of our potentialities, not just to earn a wage. Thought enters back into praxis as the radical and vigilant transformation of everyday life. The “content” of our thought is now the real social relations between people; and the reason for our praxis is not to glorify our Reason, but rather to craft a praxis that can solve particular conflicts as they are found in the real social “content.” The unity of thought and Being, or of theory and praxis, cannot be reduced to an idea, but must be achieved concretely in “real life.” It is for the sake of the transformation of “real life” that the mind escapes its formal need to be conscious of itself and instead exposes itself to the real social content which consciousness is. And– what is perhaps most important in all this– the resolution of real conflicts is not guaranteed, and no conceptual resolution can ever stand in place of “real” resolution and the solving of actual social problems: it is thus an ethical and urgent thought, reminding us that it is in our hands to transform the world and its productions. Where for Hegel the Idea amounted to infinite rest, merely waiting for us to become cognizant of “everything in its right place,” for Marx the Idea amounts to agitation, application, invention and discovery in the social sphere: it awaits only our activity, and there is no guarantee that it will be realized unless we act.
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