Introduction to Marxist Philosophy

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Chapter I: How not to think about history

Part1: Introduction

We have it on good authority that in the beginning, Adam lived in idyllic isolation in Paradise

and spent his time naming things we have to assume he did this for his own amusement as there

certainly wasnt anyone to use these newly invented names with. A Noble Savage, he had inborn inhim all the Natural Rights of Man undiminished in his isolation, just as God intended. Unfortunately,

these rather abstract rights got in the way of more concrete luxuries like sex, conversation, and keeping

the Garden of Eden in reasonable order. So, in the usual seek-and-you-shall-find fashion, God causedEve to be born from the left side of Adams chest. We dont need to get too much into the details of

what happened next, suffice it to say, they were fairly tawdry and may or may not have involved an

illicit affair between Eve and a snake; but eventually Adam and Eve were booted out of Paradise.Things are pretty grim in this Fallen world and nature could be rather uncooperative in terms of

yielding the requirements for human subsistence, but one way or another, Adam and Eve managed to

be fruitful and multiplied. All in all, however, its pretty clear that Adam would have been better off had

he just left well enough alone and never asked for a companion in the first place.What happened next is the subject of some debate. Some argue that all of humanitys problems

really started from there, and because quantity does not turn into quality, these problems have only

multiplied but have not essentially changed. Others, Francis Fukuyama, for example, argue that thingswere indeed tough for a bit, but we eventually figured things out and all lived happily ever after. There

has been history, there isnt any longer.

This is, of course, a fairly uncharitable version of certain variants of the Judeo-Christian view ofhistory. It is worth noting that this fundamentally mistaken and mysterious theory of human society

informs even some of the most ardently secular social theories. Rousseaus Of the Social Contract, for

example, seems to imagine that society was invented when a couple of men never women in the

wild happened upon each other and decided that it might be convenient to hang around. Subsequently,other thinkers complicated this theory by the realization that if three rather than two noble savages

should have entered into the Social Contract, then two could gang-up and oppress the one. That these

social contracts were always entered into in odd numbers seems therefore be the root cause ofoppression the fact that the oppressed fairly often outnumber the oppressors should not get in the way

of such neat philosophizing. Engels demolishes this view with some humor inAnti-During.

Devastatingly scathing satire aside, the purpose if this extended essay is to introduce certain key

elements of Marxist philosophy. The opening parable, which looks like an extraordinarily egregious

example of a straw-man, is, in my opinion, a fairly accurate condensation of many elements of'common sense' ruling ideology: sexism, blithe assumptions about human nature, zero sensitivity to

class and historical difference, an a-social view of individuality I didn't find a way to introduce

racism, but caricature has its limits. It is hoped that following the presentation shows why these

ideologies are nonsense and also why the foundations of Marxist philosophy make such nonsense quiteliterally (theoretically) unthinkable. Much of this will be done polemically.

There are two reasons for this: firstly, because Marxism itself is a partisan approach to the

world: it has been and continues to be developed againstrival positions. Rival approaches thereforeappear here as a foil for Marxism they will not be treated in full, or with particular respect. This is

not to suggest, of course, that allnon-Marxist approaches are essentially ridiculous (just the vast

majority of them), but since my goal here is the exposition of Marxism, rather than the entire world ofideas, non-Marxist ideas appear here only in as much as they are useful to that exposition. If this

approach loses something in fairness, I hope it gains something in readability.

Secondly, Marxism's partisan position ispolitical it is the science of working class self-


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emancipation. These ideas disrupt the ideology that the ruling classes would like to transmit to us. The

polemical style not only makes clear the political implications of Marxist ideas but also exposes some

of the contemporary ideological maneuvers of the ruling class. Non-Marxist ideas therefore appear

here also to highlight the political pitfalls that Marxism, as a more or less coherent world view, helps usto avoid. I will therefore be dealing with the ideas of the ruling class, rather than with rival ideas on the

Left (anarchism, identity politics, etc.), even though I believe that the foundations of Marxism offer a

superior base from which to analyze and build a fight against the system of oppression to which we areall opposed. The ideas of allies require much more careful, generous, and nuanced examination than

those of the exploiters and oppressors: an introduction is not the place to do that.

One last caveat before business: there isn't one Marxism. Contradictory approaches can befound within the works of Marx, the number increases if you add Engels and has multiplied with every

subsequent generation of Marxists. This introduction deals with what I take to be key elements of

Marxist thought, I try to present them in a manner that many Marxists today would find acceptable andI do not go into the debates even if my presentation effectively puts me one one side of them or

another. I wouldn't be competent to do otherwise, and if I were, I'd still have to write a very long book

rather than an essay.

Part 2: Philosophical Idealism

The great basic question of all philosophy,especially of more recent philosophy, is that

concerning the relation of thinking and being.

-Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of

Classical German Philosophy. 1886

Marx and Engels developed their thought partly in reaction to a philosophical position known as'idealism'. Briefly, idealism is a way of looking at the world which emphasizes thought over matter,

seeks to explain phenomena in terms of though, and attributes to thought greater causal weight than

matter for development: in the beginning was the word. 'Thought,' of course, has many analogues:Spirit, ideas, discourse, culture the synonym of choice is as much a matter of fashion as it is of

significant philosophical difference.

Strangely, Engles thought that idealism had been dealt a death-blow by the Revolution of1848 however moribund it may have appeared in 1886, it has certainly made a healthy recovery.

Today, it can be found nearly everywhere. The famous and philistine argument ofClash of

Civilizationsby Samuel P. Huntington, which seeks to explain international conflicts in terms ofcultural differences rather than oh, say the imperialist nations' desire for oil, demonstrates this

recovery quite clearly: Huntington was the Director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs.

Huntington has the nerve to write about the efforts of the West to promote its values of

democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance itseconomic interests and does not ever pause to consider that 'democracy and liberalism' might be at

variance with the drive to establish political and economic hegemony before informing us that these

engender countering responses from other civilizations.1

Huntington divides the world into 'civilizations' which he defines as a

cultural entity the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of culturalidentity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is

1 The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington,Foreign Affairs Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), Published by:

Council on Foreign Relations. p 29
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defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs,

institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.2

'Civilization' in Huntington's hands is therefore fundamentally an idealist category. Unsurprisingly, he

doesn't bother to mention that class antagonisms exist in every country and bloc of countries regardless

of 'subjective self-identification'. Having banished class conflict within his civilizations, he has also

conjured away the possibility that a power bloc might go to war to satisfy the needs of its ruling classrather than its people as a whole. And, having smoothed the West into a neatly cohesive contradiction-

free entity simply launching its zealous liberalism and democratic impulses like missiles at an illiberal

world, he is free to do the same for all those nations with whom the West could go to war. Apparentlytheir response is engendered as an equally texture-free 'civilization' if even the West cannot have

oppressed resisting oppressors, why bother to mention the possibility among brown folk? Why bother

to mention that reactions within these 'civilizations' might differ along lines of race, gender, andespecially, class? This would only inconveniently complicate a world where the United States and

other Western powers have struggled valiantly and vainly to

induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights.Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-

Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.3

How Huntington can square this naivety with his ironically accurate observation that In the Arabworld, in short, Western (sic!) democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces4 is anyone's guess.

It is plain to see that Huntington is a fool, a liar or both. Whatever gloss the hired mouthpieces

of empire give their actions, there remains at least a section of the West's ruling class which knows whythey would really want to send drones into Pakistan, invade Iraq, or bomb Afghanistan or Libya (or

wherever) and it has nothing to do with passionate, evangelical liberalism and everything to do with

wealth and power. The Arab Spring, with its revolutions against Western backed dictators, put the lieto the claim that there is anything particularly Western about democracy, and anything particularly

democratic in the West's foreign policies.

The Western powers (itself a bloc with considerable internal conflicts) justify their imperialismwith an idealist ideology the Near East as a stubbornly unchanging ideological entity hostile to the

West's liberal values mostly because, thanks to the history of anti-racist struggle, they can no longer

safely use the old claim that people of color were not physiologically suited for the towering

achievements of Western 'civilization'. So the phrases have changed: the ideology of the new racism iscultural not scientific. But boldfaced hypocrisies on the part of Centers for Foreign Affairs do not

necessarily prevent their cant from being accepted sincerely elsewhere.

In 2006, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous science popularizer gave a lecture which was shownon The Science Network as part of a symposium callerBeyond Belief5. The lecture is mostly about the

way in which many brilliant scientists in the past for example Newton have turned to a belief in

Intelligent Design to explain what they were not at the time capable of understanding. Although notperfect, it is for the most part, reasonably interesting. Until he gets to the final section of his talk.

Here, he informs us, that from about 800 to 1100 CE the Muslim world experienced an intense

flowering of scientific knowledge: for medicine, for astrology, for mathematics and many other

disciplines besides, the Muslim world became the center. Then along comes a closed minded scholar

2 Ibid. p. 23-24

3 Ibid. p. 414 Ibid. p. 32

5 It can be viewed at:http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-science-religion-reason-and-survival/session-

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by the name of Imam Hamid al-Ghazali:

out of his work you get the philosophy that mathematics is the work of the devil. And

nothing good can come of that philosophy. That combined with other sort of codification,philosophical codifications of what Islam was and would become: the entire intellectual

foundation of that enterprise collapsed and it has not recovered since.6

Why is he telling us about a 12th century Islamic scholar? Because, apparently he has direct bearing

on what the world of science looks like today:

If you do the math, ok just look at all the Nobel Prize winners there ever were, some even

in this room, and ask how many were Muslim? And its like one, maybe two? [] How

many Muslims are there in the world? There's like a billion Muslims [...] Had Islam notcollapsed in its intellectual standing in the year 1100 and you just do the ratios, they would

have every single Nobel Prize today; so the fact that it's not only just a few its near zero is

deeply worrying. I'm concerned about what lost what brilliance may have expressed

itself and did not. In that community, over the past thousand years.

Why are there not more Muslim Nobel Prize winners? Because al-Ghazali.7

Is it worth mentioning the sordid history of European colonialism or US imperialism? Might

rapine dictators backed by the West be a factor? America funding and training first of the Taliban thenthe Northern Alliance of warlords in Afghanistan? The CIA sponsored coup against Mossadegh in

Iran? Israel's slow genocide against the Palestinians? Do we dare mention the systematic anti-Muslim

racism that Muslims living in the West must face? Or the possibility that this racism might be presentin schools, universities, and most embarrassingly the Nobel Committee itself? Not in the least!

This is The Science Network, how could such vulgar material considerations be admitted into the lofty

ramparts of the intellect? Al-Ghazali is plenty explanation enough.This is Islamophobia at its most smug and condescending: Muslims are basically in thrall to the

ideas of a very important Imam (al-Ghazali was certainly very significant) who died 900 years ago.

Without recourse to biology, a fundamental and, in practice, eternal attribute is ascribed to like abillion people all across the world. It is an attribute which marks them as unchangingly irrational and

backwards but, oh no, let's not call it racism!

It is also, however, idealism at its most pathetic. Tyson's agenda is quite clear, in the context of

a rising tide of anti-scientific, ultra-conservative Christianity, he is worried for the American'civilization': We all know tomorrows economies will be founded on innovations in science and

technology and of course that gets cut short if we lose our civilization as what happened in Islam in

1100 AD. But just as he offers no explanation as to why anti-scientific ideas should have emerged in1100 AD or why they should have gained such prominence in what was then the center of European

thought8, so too is he unable to explain the reemergence of creationism in America today. In fact, the

possibility that the phenomenon might need explanation at all does not seem to have occurred to him: itis as though ideas merely appear without need for a cause and spread from vector to unarmed vector

like a plague from god or a zombie apocalypse.

My claim is not, of course, that people have racist ideas because they are so idealist (in fact, the

6 My transcription.7 To understand how absurd this method is, attempt it on a similar problem. Compare the ratio of women to men among

Nobel Laureates (44 out of 863 according to their website, Nobelprize.org) now how should we explain this: byblaming women or by examining the sexist society in which people grow up to be women?

8 For a very brief Marxist analysis of this, see The Islamic Revolutions in Harman, Chris.A People's History of the

World. Verso: London, 2008, pp. 123-135


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reverse could just as easily be true). But in order to engage with the world, people need a more or less

consistent world view from which to view it and by which to organize their actions. Idealism provides

one such organizing principle and it is particularly friendly to the kind of racism the imperialist ruling

classes of the West currently require. This is not to say that idealism is the sole property of culturalracism: idealism is a very common way of looking at the world, which is precisely why racism dressed

in its logic can have such traction.

Religious idealism explaining the world through the ideas of deities is, of course, very old;the theory of intelligent design is only a fairly modern example. But when it comes to explaining the

human world at least, we aren't lacking in secular versions. It isn't difficult to find a history book that

treats human history as the history of ideas. Epochs become defined by big epoch-making ideas (or themen and, sometimes, women who thought them). Ideas become the driving force in social change; in

Europe and North America in particular, since the 'Enlightenment', that change can be given a pattern

it is the pattern of progressive advancements in our ideas about human rights and social exclusion.Engles, writing about the vainglorious fantasies of the French Utopians had this to say about

their ideology:

If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case onlybecause men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man

of genius, who has now arisen [in the form of the Utopian] and who understands the truth.

That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitableevent, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy

accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have

spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.9

What Engles is saying, obviously, is that you cannot cut developments in philosophy off from other

historical developments that there is a reason the French Utopians could arise when and where theydid and not 500 years earlier.

To make a more obvious example. It is difficult to imagine that the theory of democracy

espoused by the revolutionaries of America and France could have taken the particular form that they

did in a society where the aristocratic claims to virtue by blood had not already been materiallyundercut by the growth of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes and a form of economy

appropriate to them. The ideas of Paine or Jefferson or their immediate predecessors (Voltaire, Dedirot,

Rousseau) did not appear among even the most radicalized peasants (the Diggers for example) andnothing even remotely similar ever took hold among the feudal royalty.

Given what we know about the world today: our rich and expanding scientific understanding of

the cosmos, of the fact that our minds are the result of a long process of biological evolution, that ourperception is dependent upon and affected by a vast and complicated array of electro-magnetic and

chemical processes, the entanglement of our bodies and minds given all this how is it possible for a

philosophical method which has the absurd result of reducing human beings to free-floating intellects

managed to survive and flourish?One explanation is simple mendacity on the part of our ruling classes. As the example of

cultural racism and Islamophobia demonstrates, it is convenient for some sections of the US ruling

class to say that war is a function of the 'fact' that Muslims 'hate our freedoms' than to admit that theirwealth and position as the most powerful ruling class on the planet is dependent on their ability to

secure access to resources, in particular oil, against other ruling classes; sometimes that means

diplomacy (Iran) sometimes that means war (Iraq). Given that this same powerful ruling class hasconsiderable control over which narratives we hear on the news and elsewhere, it is hardly surprising

9 Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. 1880


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that their claims might be bought into.

But this explanation requires us to believe that the hired mouthpieces of power are just a bunch

of audacious and straight-faced liars. This is only sometimes the case. Marx and Engels offer another

explanation. For them the root comes from the division of mental and manual labor in class society:from the moment this develops

consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness ofexisting practice, that it really represents something without representing something real;

from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to

proceed to the formation of pure theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

Furthermore, this division of labor

manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that

inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive

ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief

source of livelihood), while the others attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passiveand receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less

time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can

even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however,in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically

comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas

were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of thisclass.10

In other words, the professional theoretician is hamstrung precisely by the narrow and isolated

world that she inhabits. Living in the world of ideas, it is easy for her to imagine that ideas are reallyall there are to the world. The rest of the class, and in fact the rest of society, might share the same

illusion superficially, only because in their immediate, equally narrowactivities they are ad hoc

materialists. Idealism persists as an ideology precisely because the ideas of the ideologues are in factan almost entirely separate realm, with only a very indirect bearing on the actions and policies of the

'active members' of the class: the day that an idealist becomes actually responsible for the same actions

is the day she finds herself forced into materialism.

10 Engels, Frederick and Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1846


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Works Cited:

The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington,Foreign Affairs Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993),

pp. 22-49

Published by: Council on Foreign Relations

Engels, Frederick.Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. 1886
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Introduction to Marxist Philosophy