Theory: Putting Marx in context

You have already read the introduction to Marx in the textbook, which is pretty good on biographical details and in identifying the most important theoretical concepts from Marx. What I want to do is to offer a bit of background on where Marx is coming from intellectually, and why people continue to regard his ideas as important.

Probably the most important piece of the context of Marx's thinking comes from the Enlightenment agenda of perfecting the world. A lot of 19th century intellectual life can be discussed in terms of the responses to two political revolutions:

• the American Revolution, which was partly about responses in a colony to issues of imperial control, but was also largely justified by elaborating an ambitious project to create a representative democracy, one which would not rely on declarations of the divine right of a monarch to rule over everybody else. In developing this project, the people who led the American Revolution were strongly influenced philosophers like John Locke, who offered new (for the time) theories addressing the question of on what basis a government can be called legitimate, and what compels people to trade in their personal sovereignty for the benefits and constraints of living under a political authority, and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who postulated a “social contract” detailing what individuals and governments can expect from one another in this exchange.
• The French Revolution, which was also antimonarchical, but in addition to this brought in the category of “the people” as a political and historical actor, and could also probably be regarded as the first major political project to create a “nation” (as defined in terms of identity and language—French was not the dominant language in all of France at the time of the French Revolution). The major figures of the revolution often spoke in terms of projects of recreating the world in a revolutionary image, based on principles of “Reason.”

Each of these revolutions was subject to a lot of different directions, and a lot of stops and starts. There was also a large number of failed revolutionary projects in this period. But one category of thinking that became widely diffused was the idea of revolution, the sense that a combination of activity, participation and reason could be brought together to fundamentally change the world. Marx participated in these ideas.

One of the frustrations of the 19th century was that even with these political revolutions, it was not clear that the promise of democracy was going to be fulfilled. At the same time that the number of democratic states was increasing, industrialization meant that huge numbers of rural poor people moved to cities to take factory jobs, where they were often underpaid, concentrated in urban slums where the living conditions were squalid and unhealthy, and kept out of public life and politics. The widespread use of child labor, and also of slavery in some countries, made the new democratic dream appear more like a nightmare for many people. Marx was one of the people who began to interpret this situation to mean that there was a need for another revolution – societies had begun to get rid of their kings and queens, now it was time for them to get rid of their business owners, who he saw as responsible for the new form of misery.

So what is it that makes Marx so sure that the business owners are the problem? To answer that question, we have to make a quick detour into the philosophy of history…

First, tothe question of whether there is a purpose to history. Immanuel Kant wanted to find a rational basis for morality. It came to be formulated in terms of Kant’s categorical imperative. Here are two formulations of the "categorical imperative":

1. "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law."
2. "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."

Philosophically, this represents an effort to build a basis of morality that relies exclusively on reason – morality is being conceived as deriving from the need for logical consistency (rather than deriving from a source of authority). Sociologically, it presents people wanting to act in a moral way with a problem – it is deriving a principle by postulating the existence of a perfect, ideal state in which actual people do not actually live.

GWF Hegel tried to resolve this problem by introducing an element of historical contingency. He argued that by way of resolving contradictions, human history is on a (predetermined) path of moving, in every period, a bit closer to truth, to the Absolute. What this represents is an understanding of historical development that is modelled on the processes of reason and science. So we may not be able to realize Kant’s categorical imperative just yet, but when history reaches its goal, Hegel says, we will be.

Marx was heavily influenced by these ideas – the world must be better, and people should be able to count on the logic of history to move it in that direction. But there are two important differences between Kant and Hegel on the one hand and Marx on the other: they thought that they had discovered something on the level of ideas, and that understanding and perhaps changing ideas would be sufficient to bring about the change that the world needed. One of the places where this motivation is apparent is in his "Theses on Feuerbach" from 1845 (these were written in response to the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, who in his book The essence of Christianity, sought to find a material basis for religious values).

Thesis 2:
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.

Thesis 7:
Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

Thesis 8:
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.

Thesis 11:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

To change it? For what purpose? Here enters the question of what human beings are and what they need. For all his insistence on material explanation, Marx was influenced by Romantic thinking. What he offered was the concept of species being: his response to the question of what is essentially human. We will talk about this when we read Marx’s “economic and philosophic manuscripts,” but this is a problem for reading Marx – “species being” is a central concept to understanding his entire critique of modernity, but he never defines it.

Some points on "species being":
1. what distinguishes humans from other animals is that they use work in order to create their own lived environment.
2. they do this through sensuous contact with the material world.
3. by doing this they enter into relationships with one another.
4. by entering into relationships with one another, they make history and create a social order.

The closest thing in a reading of early Marx to a definition of species being comes from someone else: a footnote by R.C. Tucker in The Marx-Engels Reader:

summarizing Feuerbach on “species being”: “Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a ‘human essence’ which is the same in himself and in other men.”
in R.C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2d. ed.). New York: WW Norton and Co., pp. 34-35 fn 9.

The critique of modernity is built around this insight: capitalism creates conditions which separate (alienate) people from species being, and this has consequences throughout the whole social order. History says that this problem has to be overcome. We will discuss the problem in detail, and Marx's ideas about how it can be overcome, in the following sessions.