Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. by Robert C. TuckerReview by: Sidney HookSlavic Review, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1962), pp. 552-553Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3000469 .

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552 Slavic Review

ROBERT C. TUCKER, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961. 263 pp. $5.50, cloth; $1.75, paper.

This book attempts to interpret the thought of Marx as a continuation of the metaphysical notions about human alienation contained in the manu- scripts Marx wrote in 1844 as a young man of twenty-five. It shows a com- mendable familiarity with the writings of Marx, both published and post- humous, and an awareness of the difficulties which a revolutionary reinter- pretation of accepted views must face. One may pay tribute to the author's intellectual courage; nonetheless it is hard for this reviewer to avoid the conclusion that the effort is wrong-headed from beginning to end.

It is one thing to reconstruct the image of Marx as a person in the light of what the author fancies him to have been a kind of anguished exis- tentialist precursor of Paul Tillich. There are apparently no objective con- trols in this style of depth analysis. It is quite another thing to make the sober claim that the entire corpus of Marx's economic and historical writings is an attempt to solve the problem of self-alienation. In his attempt to make it good, the author violates accepted canons of objective historical interpretation.

He chooses to assert as Marx's distinctive doctrines, early views which are essentially Hegelian and Feuerbachian and which Marx himself left unpublished. He counts them more heavily in reconstructing Marx's thought than subsequent publications which expressly repudiate the key notions of Hegelianism, Feuerbachianism, and "true socialism" which abound in the youthful manuscripts. How far Professor Tucker is prepared to go-I cite only one of many examples which could be given-is evidenced by the fact that he transforms the militant atheism of Marx into a kind of immanent theology. He asserts that all Marx's repudiation of religion amounts to is "only a negation of the transmundane God of traditional Western religion. It did not mean the denial of a supreme being." But it certainly did mean the denial of a Supreme Being or Divinity.

When Marx wrote that "the supreme being for man is man," he was merely repeating a Feuerbachian dictum that men were projecting their own human traits into their conceptions of God. He was not even urging that men worship, or make a cult of, humanity. He dissociated himself from the Feuerbachians, among other reasons, because of their fetish of abstrac- tions. One may legitimately argue that in certain respects Marx's philosophy and psychology of religion were more shallow than Feuerbach's, but to regard the post-Feuerbachian Marx as a prophet of a new religion is only possible by the same kind of arbitrary redefinition which would convert Tolstoy and Gandhi into great soldiers because they were so militant in the cause of peace.

The author fails to see that Marx's historical approach to human nature is incompatible with the essentially religious doctrine of self-alienation which is rooted in Neo-Platonic conceptions of the separation of the soul from God or the One. What is the self alienated from? If it is alienated from its own true nature, then it must have a true nature independent of

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Reviews 553

its historical changes. But Marx emphasizes that man by acting upon society and nature continously modifies his human nature. Man can have no "true" or "fixed" nature, and in strict Marxist termns it is nonsense to say he can alienate it. The section on the fetishism of commodities in Capital has no connection except literary flavoring with the metaphysical tripe in the unpublished early manuscripts which the author dishes up as the secret of the real Marx. The author would have us believe that Marx was not primarily an historian, political economist, social philosopher and critic- good, bad, or indifferent-but an existentialist in quest of the self's liberation from "the anguish of servitude" to selfishness and greed. This view is topped in its extremism by Erich Fromm's interpretation, according to which Marx is not a Mlarxist, as customarily understood, but a Zen-Buddhist in quest of Nothingness. Both interpretations seem to me to have equal merit.

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences SIDNEY HOOK

LEONID N. PAZHITNOV, U istokov revoliutsionnogo perevorota v filosofli. Moscow: Sotseknig, 1960. 169 pp. 45 k.

L. N. Pazhitnov's work is the first book by a Soviet scholar to concern itself exclusively with Karl Marx's early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, although recent Soviet periodical literature has manifested some interest in these materials for nearly a decade. Combating some Western and "revisionist" reinterpretations of Marxism on the basis of these ma- terials, Pazhitnov's objective is to show that the Mantscripts were written from the "materialist-communist standpoint," preserving only the termi- nology of German classical philosophy.

Pazhitnov holds that Marxism originated from an "independent, scientific discovery" after Marx had transcended German "philosophical idealism." Since he recognizes the first rough formulation of Marx's most important later economic concepts in the Manuscripts, he of necessity interprets this as a "materialist" work, independent of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Hess. Realizing that to establish his interpretation he must deal with Marx's concept of "alienation" and evaluation of Hegel's Phenoonenology of Mind in the Manutscripts, Pazhitnov makes these topics the subject of his two most im- portant chapters.

Since "alienation" enjoyed a metaphysical and psychological meaning in German philosophy, he interprets Marx's concept as a purely economic- sociological expression of the separation of the worker from the object of his labor, which occurs because the worker does not own the means of production in capitalist society. Although the implication of his argument is that alienation is the result of bourgeois private property, he is aware that Marx declared alienation to be the cautse of private property, and so espouses the latter view, asserting that Marx did not in 1844 answer the question how man comes to alienate his labor.

Since Marx concluded in the third manuscript that the avarice of the human species and the secular worship of money was the basis of alienated

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