Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Praxis makes perfect

By Todd Chretien

In a short piece published after his death, Marx pointed to the importance of theory and action, and how they are intertwined in the process of struggle.

http://socialistworker.org/2013/03/26/praxis-makes-perfect

March 26, 2013

"Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

THIS FAMOUS quote comes from a three-page outline Karl Marx wrote for himself in 1845 called Theses on Feuerbach [2]. (Marx Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, pp. 3-5). This quote is thesis XI. It was only published 43 years later as an appendix to a set of writings edited by his friend Frederick Engels.

Many people take Marx to mean that theory is less important than action. I can't count the number of times I have heard a certain sort of activist exclaim, "Enough! No more talk, it's time for action!" By this logic, you are guilty of wasting your time right now by reading this when you should be out in the streets doing something!!! (Normally, multiple exclamation points accompany outbursts like this.) At least you're not as guilty as I am for taking the time to write this article in the first place.

It is true that by the time Marx wrote these words, he was well and truly sick of many of his philosopher friends-turned-armchair-critics. Yet, if we leave it there, it is hard to explain why he and his pal Engels spent so much time immersed in study.

The Theses on Feuerbach help answer this question. They are both a continuation of Marx and Engels' previously-held ideas and something new, a solution to one of the lingering contradictions in those works.

As I noted in my last column on Engels' book, The Condition of the English Working Class [3], both he and Marx tended to see the working class as the emotional and physical "heart" of the revolution, while the (radical) philosophers would provide the "brain." A starkly elitist position.

This reflected an ongoing debate about the origins of human knowledge and historical change, one that has continued to this day. If you have ever had a discussion with someone who says "we won't have any mass movements until we have a new Martin Luther King or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn," you are familiar with this dilemma. In the Theses, for the first time, Marx proposes an entirely new way to think about this problem.

Keep in mind that Marx wrote these notes, as was his habit, as a sort of intellectual condensation and outline. This can sometimes make it difficult to separate out what Marx is merely paraphrasing for his own purposes, critiques he is making of those paraphrases and, finally, his own independent ideas. These theses were never intended for publication, and we don't even know how important Marx thought they were. Did he paste them on the wall and commit them to memory? Or were they a quick summary that he shoved in the drawer?

It is true that many years later Engels wrote that:

[W]hen, in the spring of 1845, we met again in Brussels, Marx had already fully developed his materialist theory of history...this discovery, which revolutionized the science of history, and which, as we've seen, is essentially the work of Marx--a discovery which I can claim for myself only a very small share--was...of immediate importance for the workers movement... (CW, Vol. 26, p. 318)

He was being characteristically modest in giving Marx all the credit and perhaps a bit grandiose to proclaim their theory's "immediate importance for the workers movement."

Nonetheless, in order to more clearly explain what Engels' thought was so innovative, I will rearrange the order of these theses, combining them into four groups. Why rearrange the order? Well, Marx might not like to hear this, but I think several of his theses are a bit repetitive. You are free to read them in the order that Marx wrote them, but I hope my presentation will ease the way.

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BUT FIRST, who was Ludwig Feuerbach? He's not exactly a household name these days. Right up until the winter or spring of 1845, he was Marx's favorite philosopher, whom Marx had hoped would collaborate with him on launching a new radical magazine.

As I wrote in a previous columns, Marx had largely sided with Feuerbach against those young Hegelians, like Bruno Bauer [4], whom they both considered to have become obsessed with increasingly obscure philosophical terminology and who disparaged the actions of common people. (You might have met a few of these types along the way.)

Feuerbach argued that philosophers and radicals must turn squarely to a study of humanity's "species-being," our unique attribute of consciousness that sets us apart from other animals. He proposed a humanistic philosophy, designed to make people realize that the qualities that they assigned to god or spirit were really just the best of humanity. God was a human creation, and not the other way around. So far so good for Marx.

Here is a passage from Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity [5], which I think gives a good idea of his progressive humanism, an attempt to make Christianity into a universal doctrine by detaching the idea of love from the limits of one religion:

Man is to be loved for man's sake. Man is an object of love because he is an end in himself, because he is a rational and loving being. This is the law of the species, the law of the intelligence...Love is the subjective reality of the species, as reason is its objective reality. In love, in reason, the need of an intermediate person disappears. Christ is nothing but an image, under which the unity of the species has impressed itself on the popular consciousness. Christ loved men: he wished to bless and unite them all without distinction of sex, race, rank or nationality.

Marx grew increasingly uncomfortable with this talk of love as the solution to capitalism.

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SO, WITH no further ado, here are the eleven Theses on Feuerbach in the four Groups referred to above.

Group 1: Marx explains Feuerbach's method and critiques his ahistorical humanism

IV. Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

VI. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently obliged:

-- 1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
-- 2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as "genus," as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals in a natural way.

VII. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the "religious sentiment" is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

In IV, Marx argues that Feuerbach simply asserts, even if he is right to do so, that religion is a "self alienation" of humanity, and Marx criticizes him for seeing his job as simply waking people up to the idea that God was invented by people, and not the other way around. Marx thinks this is insufficient and argues that the specific, historical human circumstances (the changing forms of families, for instance) that gave rise to religious ideas must be studied and, in turn, "revolutionized in practice."

In VI, Marx agrees with Feuerbach about resolving "the religious essence into the human essence," but then asks, what is this "human essence?" Is it something that "naturally" links all the "single individuals" in the world into one amorphous blob?

No, says Marx, "in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." Here are some examples of this "ensemble": master and slave, worker and boss, colonizer and colonized, and many more based on race, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc. And don't forget, all of this is constantly changing over time.

In place of this complexity, Feuerbach merely ascribes to billions of atomized individuals, without any reference to their specific social position, an "essence," which supposedly unites them. As we saw from The Essence of Christianity quote mentioned before, his unifying principle is love.

Marx disagrees so intently with this that he says so again in VII. See? Repetitive, right?

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Group 2: Marx counterposes Feuerbach's contemplation to revolutionary practice

I. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism--that of Feuerbach included--is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism--which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary," of "practical-critical," activity.

V. Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants sensuous contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.

III. The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator himself must be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only asrevolutionary practice.

If in Group 1, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for failing to analyze concrete social conditions, in Group 2, he discusses the implications of this approach when it comes to how to change the world.

In I, Marx argues against Feuerbach's strict separation between mental (subjective) processes and external (objective) circumstances. What we do, "sensuous human activity, practice" (here sensuous is referring to our senses, don't confuse this with sensual), for Feuerbach, is merely conceived of as anobject. The real action goes on in our brains.

You might have caught this in the quote from The Essence of Christianity where Feuerbach says "Love is the subjective reality of the species, as reason is its objective reality." He is trying to find a way out of the object/subject divide, but falls back on love versus intelligence or emotion versus intellect or heart versus head. Sound familiar?

Thus, Feuerbach is stuck in a bind. He wants humans to be the center of his philosophy, but sees most of what we do as "external." It was the great idealists, Hegel chief among them with his Absolute Spirit moving through time, who understood action, but only in an abstract and ideal sense.

Marx says we should see "human activity itself as objective activity." Feuerbach asserts that we should understand the "theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude," so he disparages social-economic activity, which Marx refers to as "dirty-Jewish form of appearance."

Here, Marx is linking Feuerbach's assessment of the Jewish god as supposedly egoistic--in theological terms--with the stereotypical association of the Jewish community to commerce. Thus, Feuebach's inability to conceive of human activity, economic or otherwise, itself--which simultaneously requires mental and manual activity--blinded him to what Marx calls "revolutionary" or "practical–critical" activity.

Here, Marx is not using the word "revolutionary" only in its political sense, but in a broader way that points to the impact of human cooperation on nature and on the "ensemble of social relations." (It should be said in Feuerbach's defense that the disparaging reference to Judiasm is Marx's phrase, not Feuerbach's. Marx was most likely using this phrase ironically by this stage. See my commentary on Marx's On the Jewish Question [6].)

In V, Marx essentially repeats this argument in condensed form before unveiling in III the beating heart of the new theory that Engels was so excited about. Marx's novel observation that "the educator must be himself educated" is the key for his whole new conception of epistemology (the study of where ideas come from) and social change.

Now, in place of gods or ideals or philosophers or heroes moving history through the force of their will, not only social development, but even knowledge, must flow from a dialectical process which integrates both intellectual and social life, the "coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing," or what he calls "revolutionary practice."

If you've ever heard the terms praxis, this is what it's all about. Why praxis and not just "revolutionary practice?" As near as I can tell there are at least two reasons. First, praxis means "practice" in German and, in the same way certain people like to tell you that they are reading Das Kapital instead of just saying they are reading Capital, it sounds cooler to say "praxis." (I have found that, generally speaking, people who say they are reading Das Kapitalneither speak German nor are reading Capital.)

Second, when the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists, he used the term "philosophy of praxis" as a substitute for "Marxism" to get it past the prison censors and the phrase kind of stuck.

At any rate, Marx makes it very clear that this praxis does not mean a simple rejection of intellectual activity, far from it. "Revolutionary action" conceives of theory and practice as a continuous process. It is not that they are two sides of the same coin, a metaphor which still implies dualism, even if there is close relationship. Marx is not arguing first theory, then practice, nor is he arguing first practice, then theory.

They constitute a simultaneous, interpenetrated, mixed-up phenomena which has to be thought of as two aspects of one whole, a totality, in continuous motion. There is no educator who is not simultaneously being educated and no one who is being educated who is not simultaneously an educator.

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Group 3. Marx returns to a critique of Bruno Bauer and now includes Feuerbach

II. 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-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

VIII. 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.

This is partly a restatement of comments that Marx had made in The Holy Family in his attack on Bruno Bauer, referenced above, and also a repetition of the point he made in Group 2 with respect to his theory of where knowledge comes from (epistemology).

Philosophers, says Marx, failed to pay close enough attention to the real material world, and critically, how it changes over time. Therefore, they were content to consider abstract concepts (love, justice, self, being, god, etc.) and this led them all to mysticism and the search for the one "true" ideal that could give meaning to all others.

Marx argues that this is exactly what happened to Hegel when he explained all of human history as the mere process of the Absolute Spirit becoming aware of itself over time, leaving behind positive residues in the form of civilizations and their multifarious social, economic and political forms.

But if before he criticized Hegel and his extreme idealism, Marx now argues that even a materialist (the "doctrine of changing circumstances" to explain changes in human behavior) such as Feuerbach can fall into this trap if abstract concepts--"love" in Feuerbach's case--are simply counterposed to society, instead of attempting to understand ideas as arising out of historical, temporary, changing circumstances.

For instance, when a slave and a slave-owner use the word "love," do they really mean the same thing? Is there anything in common between the notion of "justice" held by the Nazis and by the Warsaw Ghetto resisters? No, knowledge must arise, argues Marx, from social context.

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Group 4. Marx argues that the point of revolutionary practice is the comprehension of existing (capitalist) society and its overthrow

IX. The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.

X. The standpoint of the old materialism is "civil" society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Theses IX and X seem to make almost no sense, until we realize that what Marx means by "civil society" is the liberal notion of citizenship and democracy which do not take into account the realities of concrete, historically specific "human society," in fact, capitalist society, divided as it is by class. This is the point he was getting at in VI, but he didn't use the terms "civil" or "human" society.

He criticizes Feuerbach throughout for failing to analyze specific class societies and how they changed over time. IX and X are his promise to do just thatat length in his upcoming work. Hold on to your hats.

If I'm right and you've followed all this, we can now, finally, rewrite Marx's famous thesis XI as follows:

Philosophers have not studied how and why human history changes over time; instead they have mistaken the society they happen to have been born into as being essentially similar to all human history, from the Garden of Eden to Disneyland; they have merely interpreted various abstract and timeless notions, supposedly having to do with humanity's eternal soul or being. The point is to study the really-existing class society in which you live by participating in a struggle to change it; only by integrating intellectual and social-political action into a new form of revolutionary practice (praxis) can the educator (the masses themselves) be educated (by their own thought-action-thought process or, alternatively, their own action-thought-action process) in order gain the theoretical knowledge necessary to do win that practical struggle.

That's a mouthful, so now you see why people normally leave aside the first ten theses and skip right to the end! But Marx never makes it easy for you. He believed that thinking was just as hard as doing and, vice versa, and that if you (and millions of your friends) want to be an effective revolutionary educator/educated, you have to learn how to walk and chew gum at the same time.

What's missing from all this? Just three little things: history, the working class and communism.

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We'll get to those next time in The German Ideology, Vol. 1, Preface and Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks (I-IV) [7]. It's about 65 pages all together.

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Columnist: Todd Chretien

Todd Chretien is a long-time Bay Area activist. He contributes frequently to the International Socialist Review [8] and to Socialist Worker on the topics of U.S. and Latin American politics and the ideas of the Marxist tradition.

From the belly of the beast

By Todd Chretien

Engels' great muckraking work on the heart of the Industrial Revolution captures the fluidity and chaos of capitalist society--and the power of the class that can defeat it.

http://socialistworker.org/2013/03/05/from-the-belly-of-the-beast

March 5, 2013

FREDERICK ENGELS was born into a prosperous mill-owning family in Barmen, Germany, in 1820. Although his upbringing was carefree and loving, by the time he hit puberty, Engels rejected his parents' small-town Protestant religious mindset. After apprenticing in the family business, he went to Berlin in the late 1830s to complete his compulsory military service, spending most of his time sitting in on lectures at the University of Berlin and carousing with a group of radicals known as the Young Hegelians [1].

Horrified by his son's bouts of drinking and raucous defiance of the Berlin authorities, Engels' pious father sent him to work as a manager in the family textile factory in Manchester, England. But Engels subverted his father's designs by falling in love with an Irish Catholic revolutionary named Mary Burns, immersing himself in the working-class movement, and amassing a wealth of data from inside the factory in order to expose the secrets of capitalist exploitation.

The product of Engels' 21 months in Manchester, The Condition of the English Working Class [2], is one of the great muckraking books of all time. However, The Condition is not only a powerful denunciation of capitalist conditions; it is also a pioneering theoretical work which demonstrates that Engels was an active partner in the development of revolutionary socialism--what has come to be known as "Marxism." In fact, he elaborated many of its key tenets before Marx himself.

In The Holy Family, Marx wrote [3], "It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with its being, it will be historically compelled to do." (p. 37, in Marx and EngelsCollected Works, Volume 4. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975)

This is an extraordinarily expansive and daring statement, but it was most certainly not based on firsthand knowledge of industrial capitalism. Marx had by then caught only a glimpse in Paris of "what the proletariat is." Engels, on the other hand, came face to face with the real thing in Manchester.

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How Capitalism Works

Engels insists that socialists cannot be content to speculate in the abstract. "A knowledge of the proletarian conditions is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories." (p. 302, CW, Vol. 4) Therefore, he begins his Introduction [4] with a fast-moving account of the radical changes capitalism has wrought in England:

The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century [the 18th century], with the invention of the steam engine and of machinery for working cotton. Those inventions gave rise, as is well known, to an industrial revolution. (p. 307, CW, Vol. 4)

This revolution destroyed the rural, agricultural way of life; it pulled hundreds of thousands of Irish poor into British cities, and it made the United Kingdom the world's pre-eminent economic power. Machines, steam power and cotton created the proletariat.

What is responsible for this transformation? Engels sums it up in a one-word chapter title, "Competition" [5]: "Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything...is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes." (p. 375, CW, Vol. 4)

Whereas Adam Smith saw this process as one-sidedly increasing the "Wealth of Nations," even if he decried some of its social consequences, Engels--before Marx--offers a sophisticated explanation of why capitalist competition could give rise to great riches while simultaneously producing crippling crises and slumps. Putting his detailed readings in political economy and his experience in the factory manager's office to use, Engels demonstrates the relationship between wages as commodities and unemployment on the one hand, and free-market competition and cyclical commercial crises on the other:

In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying needs, but for profit, in the system under which everyone works for himself to enrich himself, disturbances inevitably arise at every moment...Everything is done blindly, as guesswork, more or less at the mercy of accidents...A crisis usually recurs once in five years after a brief period of activity and general prosperity. (pp. 381-382, CW, Vol. 4)

What is the consequence of all this? In a terrifying chapter called "The Great Towns," [6] Engels details the grim conditions that powered Britain's empire. Today, we have become accustomed to gigantic metropolises. But in Engels' days, there was nothing like industrial England on the planet. London's population of 2.5 million was more than twice as big as Paris, eight times bigger than Berlin and New York City and 12 times bigger than Rome.

Engels, who had lived in Berlin, described the shock of encountering the behemoth for the first time:

This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and half million a hundred fold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world...all of this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness. (p. 328, CW, Vol. 4)

It is Engels' contention that socialism, if it is to mean anything, must leave behind academic squabbles over philosophy and find a way to take root in thisnew world.

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Radical Chains

While Engels appreciates the power of England's industrial revolution, he is even more impressed with the toll it takes on the working class that makes it all possible:

The sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature...The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together. (p. 329, CW, Vol. 4)

Marx had attacked the alienation imposed on humanity by capitalism in his 1844 Manuscripts [7], but those essays still bore the marks of philosophical contemplation and his disgust at the stultifying emptiness of German intellectual life. Here, Engels discovers the depths to which capitalist brutalization can sink into disease and dirt and blood and sewage. Dispensing with any romanticism, he exposes how these conditions generally overwhelm the working class:

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor...If he can get no work, he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quite an inoffensive manner. (p. 330, CW, Vol. 4)

In the chapter simply titled "Results," [8], Engels charges the rich with committing "social murder" against the poor by means of 14-hour work days, air pollution and respiratory afflictions, disease born by contaminated water supplies, addiction and street violence, shocking infant and maternity mortality rates, child labor and neglect, illiteracy, industrial accidents and deadly tenement fires and collapses. (p. 394, CW, Vol. 4)

But these are not the only results. Through no desire of their own, hundreds of thousands of workers were thrust into a terrifying new world. They were the victims, not the beneficiaries of England's rise. But they were a special class of victims--victims with enormous potential power.

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What the Proletariat Is

If the centralization of population stimulates and develops the property-holding class, it forces the development of the workers yet more rapidly. The workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united...the consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain social and political importance. The great cities are the birthplaces of labor movements..." (p. 418, CW, Vol. 4)

Here, Engels puts flesh on the bones of Marx's vision of a class with radical chains. He goes beyond the abstract idea that a class with nothing "ought" to overturn everything and points to the real social dynamics and lived conditions which make possible a new type of human solidarity--a "view peculiar to the workers." Class consciousness won't come from the lecture hall, Engels makes clear, but from a critical self-awareness of the possibilities of unity that arise out of the very conditions that capitalism has created in the great cities.

For Engels, class struggle--and, specifically, strikes--holds the key to creating this new awareness among workers. Despite the fact that they were normally beaten in their struggles by the superior power of employers and the state, strikes transformed working-class people. In the chapter "Labor Movements," [9] he writes:

Thus were the workingmen forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain. First of all, this nineteen weeks strike had torn the miners of the North of England forever from the intellectual death in which they had hitherto lain; they have left their sleep, are alert to defend their interests, and have entered the movement of civilization, and especially the movement of the workers. (p. 545, CW, Vol. 4)

Engels does not rule out the possibility of reform, but believes the main obstacle to social progress is that "the bourgeoisie will not take warning." Thus, "all hope of a peaceful solution of the social question for England must be abandoned. The only possible solution is a violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place." (p. 545-547, CW, Vol. 4)

However, even as Engels looks to the working class to make this revolution, he continues to stress a separation between what Marx called the "head" and the "heart" of the revolution--seemingly reserving for the intelligentsia (or at least only a small group of enlightened workers) the role of leadership:

I think that before the outbreak of open, declared war of the poor against the rich, there will be enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat, to enable the communistic party, with the help of events, to conquer the brutal element of the revolution...And as Communism stands above the strife between bourgeoisie and proletariat, it will be easier for the better elements of the bourgeoisie (which are, however, deplorably few, and can look for recruits only among the rising generation) to unite with it than with purely proletarian Chartism. (p. 582, CW, Vol. 4)

Here, Engels sees communism as a political point of view which he does not necessarily directly connect to the struggles of the working class. In fact, he goes so far as to say that communism, ostensibly because of its general opposition to the alienation suffered by all classes under capitalism, will be more palatable to the bourgeoisie than what he calls "purely proletarian Chartism," a name referring to the mass workers movement demanding a Charter of Rights in the 1830s and 1840s in England.

No doubt part of the reason for this dualism in Engels' thinking has to do with the general problem of the development of political consciousness in an oppressed class. However, it also has to be said that Engels was simultaneously a sharp enough observer of the obstacles to working-class unity to take them seriously and enough of an elitist (at this stage) to draw pessimistic conclusions as to workers' ability to overcome these divisions without the intervention of some external political force.

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What Divides "What the Proletariat Is"

As for the divisions between working-class people, in addition to the symptoms of the social crises referenced above (crime, addiction, etc.), Engels addresses race, immigration and gender.

The most important omission in Engels' work is the absence of any discussion of African slavery in the New World. Despite the fact that Manchester existed almost solely because of King Cotton in the American South, Engels entirely ignores actually existing slavery. Wrong-headedly, he argues that industrial workers [10] "are worse slaves than the Blacks in America, for they are more sharply watched, and yet it is demanded of them that they shall live like human beings, shall think and feel like men!" (p. 468, CW, Vol. 4)

African slavery had only been outlawed in the British Empire in 1834, so it was common for radicals to compare the plight of workers in England to that of slaves in the colonies or in the United States. If criticism of "white slavery" was at times an effective rhetorical device, it also has to be said that it served to downplay the critical distinctions between free labor and chattel slavery, and tended to skirt around (or worse) the question of race and racism.

Although it is important to keep in mind this shortcoming, Engels makes fascinating use of the idea of "race" (by which he means different European nationalities) to describe the extreme social hostility between the working class and the bosses:

The mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery Irish temperament with a stable, reasoning, persevering English must, in the long run, be productive only of good for both. The rough egotism of the English bourgeoisie would have kept its hold upon the working class much more firmly if the Irish nature, generous to a fault, ruled primarily by sentiment, had not intervened, and softened the cold, rational English character in part by mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary conduct of life. In view of all this, it is not surprising that the working class has gradually become a race which is wholly apart from English bourgeoisie. (p. 419, CW, Vol. 4)

Here, Engels argues that the English working class not only suffers from miserable conditions, it even suffers from a loss of English-ness. In a very real way, Engels is describing the making of the working class as an international social entity, not simply in its ideas, but in its literal human composition. So if he suffers from occasional blind spots and forgets to place the working class in Manchester in its global context, he is clearly opening the door to future insights in these regards.

This is all the more remarkable since Engels readily accepts some of the worst stereotypes of Irish immigrants [11]:

Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery carefree temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favor drunkenness. (p. 391-392, CW, Vol. 4)

Engels then counterposes this ugly prejudice to his praise for the supposedly upright moral character of the skilled section of the English working class.

On the one hand, Engels is here demonstrating that he had not yet freed himself from the ugliest national and racial conceptions upon which European capitalism, colonialism and slavery were built. On the other hand, even as he decries the supposed national failings of the Irish, he condemns English landlords for what he calls the "most brutal plundering of the Irish people," and he ends up in predicting that the Irish immigrant workers in England may yet act as "a leaven which will produce its own results in the future." (p. 560, CW, Vol. 4)

This call for unity between English and Irish workers jostles uncomfortably with his derogatory remarks. However, even mired in his prejudice, Engels understands that immigration must be a permanent component of industrial capitalism and identifies the fact that there can be no such thing as a purely local or national working class. His last word on the subject is his support for "the conquest of national independence" for Ireland from England, a conviction no doubt taught to him by Mary Burns and one he ardently retained for the remainder of his life.

As with race and immigration, in many ways, Engels' views on gender may often appear to us as quite backwards. For instance, he sometimes writes as if the working class were entirely composed of men: "Since, as we have seen, no single field for the exercise of his manhood is left to him, save his opposition to the whole conditions of his life, it is natural that exactly in his opposition he should be most manly, noblest, most worthy of sympathy." (p. 502, CW, Vol. 4) This is clearly not a matter of "he" serving as a universal pronoun. Engels really is only thinking of men in this case.

Yet these sorts of comments must be balanced by his exposure of the fact that the English working class was largely composed of women, as well as young girls and boys. In fact, Engels finds that out of 419,590 textile factory workers in Britain in 1839, 242,296 were women or girls. Thus, more than 60 percent of the people who powered the industrial revolution in Britain were female. (p. 436, CW, Vol. 4)

Even if Engels couldn't entirely come to grips with all the implications flowing from this, the fact remains that he recognized the proletariat, Marx's class with radical chains, as involving women from its very beginnings.

Combined with the deadly conditions in the factories and slums, this massive participation by women in the factory system led to a rapid breakdown in traditional gender roles in the family. As Engels notes [12], "in many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. This case happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. (p. 438, CW, Vol. 4)

By all accounts, Engels rejected the Puritanical morals of his parents when it came to sexuality. However, this seems to have initially merely manifested as a rejection on his part of monogamy and traditional marriage. In a time before contraception, this could easily veer towards a simple self-serving justification for a young man who hoped to enjoy an exciting sex life.

And although Engels clearly enjoyed shocking his middle-class German audience by citing instances of gender role reversals, at times, he appears to condemn the breakdown of the distinctions between the sexes. For example, with respect to men staying at home and doing domestic labor, he writes:

Can anyone imagine a more insane state of things...? And yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness--this condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, humanity, is the last result of our much praised civilization. (p. 439, CW, Vol. 4)

This sounds very much like hostility towards capitalism's tendency, at this stage in history, to break down gender roles. Yet Engels produces the most unexpected and revolutionary of conclusions, "We must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman, too." (p. 439, CW, Vol. 4)

In other words, Engels recognizes that a simple return to "normal" gender relations can only mean a return to the "inhuman" oppression of women.

So what are we to make of all this? In The Condition, Engels is clearly overwhelmed at times by all he sees and experiences. If his recognition of the proletariat as a potential social force capable of undoing the British Empire shines through, he's equally aware of the challenges it faces.

Capital drew together millions of workers and subjected them to a dizzying barrage of physical disease, psychological anxiety and brute force. These workers--as Engels so clearly demonstrates, even where his analysis falls short--were never homogenous with respect to nationality, age and gender.

If Engels expected a shorter resolution to this conflict than history was to provide, he succeeded in capturing the fluidity and chaos which saturates every level of capitalist society. That insight, combined with a revolutionary outrage at the suffering it engenders, makes this book more relevant today than perhaps at any time since its first publication.

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Next time, read Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach [13] and Marx and Engels' The German Ideology [14], Vol. 1, Preface and Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks (I-IV). All together, it's about 70 pages.

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Columnist: Todd Chretien

Todd Chretien is a long-time Bay Area activist. He contributes frequently to the International Socialist Review [15] and to Socialist Worker on the topics of U.S. and Latin American politics and the ideas of the Marxist tradition.

What do ideas do?

By Todd Chretien

Marx and Engels used their critique of an obscure German theologian to help them work out their theory of socialist revolution and conception of the truth.

http://socialistworker.org/2012/10/24/what-do-ideas-do

October 24, 2012

THE GREAT scholar David McClellan politely calls The Holy Family [2], Marx and Engels' first published book, "baroque." I would call it just plain weird.

Marx and Engels had met back in Germany briefly in 1842, but when Engels came to Paris in August 1844, the two met at the Café de la Régance and became BFFs. As Engels put it, "[O]ur complete theoretical agreement in all fields became obvious and our joint work dates from that time."

Engels was back from 21 months in Manchester, England, where he worked at his father's textile firm as a manager. There, he had immersed himself in the Chartist and socialist working-class movements.

As I pointed out in my last column [3], Marx had recently lauded the first major strike in Germany, that of the Silesian textile workers. He praised these German proletarians as "the soldiers of socialism," whose rebellion contained a "universal soul" striving towards social revolution. Based on their mutual sense of impending workers revolution, the two friends naturally agreed to write a book that...wait for it...attacked an obscure German theologian.

Maybe all that Parisian wine had gone to their heads?

In Engels' defense, he scratched out his 15 pages of what was supposed to be a short pamphlet in a few days, mercilessly ridiculing Bruno Bauer, Marx's one-time mentor, and Bauer's supposedly ultra-radical school of "Critical Criticism." Engels accuses Bauer of adopting an elitist point of view whereby ideas alone would light the way to a better world in place of the everyday struggles of "the mass."

Although Bauer and his associates claim that religion is the root of all evil, Engels mockingly compares them to the Christian Church itself, writing [4], "Critical Criticism...so loved the mass that it sent its only begotten son, that all who believe him may not be lost but may have critical life." (p. 9, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 4. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975)

Some of this is funny, if you have a very particular sense of humor, but after the first couple of pages, you get the point. But then Marx takes up the pen and writes another 185 pages! The bulk of this outpouring leads to the conclusion that Marx' s publisher did not employ an editor.

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SO WHAT are Marx's main points?

First, Marx outlines his theory of working-class revolution; second, he develops his understanding of how we judge truth and knowledge (what is called epistemology in philosophical circles); and third, he begins to sketch his views of how ideas and social conditions combine to make history.

Marx starts off Chapter Four by defending the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon [5] against Edgar Bauer (Bruno's brother), who wrote, "The fact of misery, of poverty, makes Proudhon one-sided in his considerations; he sees in it a contradiction to equality and justice; it provides him with a weapon. Hence, this fact becomes for him absolute and justified, whereas the fact of property becomes unjustified."

In other words, according to Bauer, Proudhon was wrong to assert that private property had to be abolished. "Criticism, on the other hand," writes Bauer, "joins the two facts, poverty and property, in a single unity." (p. 33-34, CW, Vol. 4)

Marx next hoists the Critical Critics on their own Hegelian sword. Where they emphasize the unity of wealth and poverty (in the name of totality), Marx emphasizes contradiction, struggle, antagonism--what he had previously called the dialectic of negativity: "Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole." (pp. 35-36, CW, Vol. 4)

If in Hegel the motor force of these contradictions was merely a working out, an externalization and an objectification of (what Hegel called positivity) Absolute Spirit or God's self-awareness, then for Marx, it was the concrete economic development of private property and the antagonistic classes it created driving the process:

Indeed, private property drives itself and its economic movement towards its own disillusion...The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat...When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. (p. 36, CW, Vol. 4)

If the proletariat can defeat the private property owners, then not only will it abolish the ruling class, but at the same time, it will have to abolish poverty and even wage labor itself by organizing a society based on communal (non-exploited) labor. This is what happens when a class with "radical chains" comes to power.

But this raises two questions: First, why will the proletariat struggle? And second, why won't the owners of private property reform the system themselves?

Marx answers the first question with a few sentences that summarize his whole theory of socialist revolution. It is worth reading them over a couple times:

Since in the fully formed proletariat the abstraction [that is, the annihilation--TC] of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need--the practical expression of necessity--is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself.

But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. (p. 37, CW, Vol. 4)

In other words, the social conditions in which the working class finds itself so directly contradict our human nature (or our "species-being," the label Marx uses in the Manuscripts of 1844) that people in that situation will naturally revolt, of "necessity," against those conditions.

Of course, poverty is an obvious motivating factor to hate the society you've been born into, but if capitalism as a whole is so destructive of humanity, why don't the capitalists themselves oppose it, at least after they realize what it is doing to the planet? Don't they need an ozone layer as much as the workers?

This is a very common question among political people today. For instance, many liberal people who support President Obama hope that at least some people in the ruling class will recognize the destructive tendencies within the system and switch sides.

Once in a very great while, this may happen, but as a general rule, the rich do what they can to stay rich, even at the expense of the planet, horrifying wars and the deadening of the human spirit. So are they just as much victims of capitalism as the people they exploit? Marx gives a very interesting "yes and no" answer:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present [suffer--TC] the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence...an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. (p. 36, CW, Vol. 4)

The rich may be alienated, may even be depressed at times, but as a rule, they compensate themselves with a semblance of human nature, based on their own power over society as a whole. Yes, money can buy you love! Especially--and this is crucial--because all that money buys you political power, a bit of control and the freedom to do what you want, at least part of the time, and in that freedom, the rich can recover a "semblance of a human existence." And they fear losing this most of all.

So the rich not only feel threatened by working-class struggle because they may have to give up their money and power, they also mistake their own stunted humanity for the "universal soul" intrinsic to the proletariat and, therefore, honestly (at least as honestly as scoundrels are able) believe they are defending humanity itself by defending their own narrow privileges.

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NOW SOME of these passages sound as if Marx is expecting that this will be automatic. In fact, he tends to treat the proletariat almost as a philosophical category:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in according with its being, it will historically be compelled to do...There is no need to explain here that a large part of the French and English proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity. (p. 37, CW, Vol. 4)

There are many things to say about a passage like this. First, it presents an incredible vision of an impending revolution and links that vision to the power of a social class that includes millions of people, as opposed to the theoretical or intellectual labor of a few isolated philosophers. As such, it is radically democratic.

At the same time, Marx does seem to adopt a deterministic attitude here--and I think it's wrong to simply dismiss Marx's emphasis on historical necessity, the question of the proletariat's being and what it will "historically be compelled to do" as rhetorical flourishes.

Rather, at this stage in his life, Marx knows relatively little about the actual history of working-class struggle. He sees as his main audience, not the working class of France or Germany or England, but a small handful of radical intellectuals grouped around his former colleagues in the Young Hegelian movement.

And if his reliance on philosophical categories (being is a loaded term in the Hegelian vernacular; it is the title of Chapter One of the Science of Logic) provided a strength whereby Marx could imagine dramatic social developments, that reliance also tended to telescope the complexity of those social developments in his mind.

This raises an interesting question of consciousness. In the above-cited passage, Marx emphasizes the fact that French and English workers are discussing ideas and "working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity."

In other words, it is clear that the actions and ideas of individual workers and groups of workers play a very large role in the struggle. But at the same time, if it does not matter "what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim," then it's not really clear if all of that argument and effort is needed, since the very being of the proletariat will inevitably force it to come to those conclusions anyway.

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ALTHOUGH HE never fully resolves the question of how consciousness is produced, Marx does challenge the Critical Critics' idealist conception of human knowledge in Chapter Six in an extended critique of Bauer's notion of truth [6]:

For Herr Bauer, as for Hegel, truth is an automaton that proves itself. Man must follow it. As in Hegel, the result of real development is nothing but the truth proven, i.e., brought to consciousness...Just as, according to the earlier teleologists, plants exist to be eaten by animals, and animals to be eaten by man, history exists in order to serve as the act of consumption of theoretical eating--proving. Man exists so that history may exist, and history exists so that the proof of truths exist." (p. 79, CW, Vol. 4)

Marx rejects what is called teleological thinking--that is, the idea that the existence of some thing, some idea or some social class can be explained by something that is supposedly supposed to happen in the future, or based on some abstract explanation of its purpose. An example of this would be if you ask why the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun, and your answer is: so that life can exist here. This would be a teleological argument.

So Marx is accusing the Critical Critics and Hegel himself of engaging in this sort of argument when they explain human history by reference to the self-consciousness of some abstract spiritual or intellectual force. For example, for Hegel, why did the Roman Empire exist? So that the Absolute Spirit could become aware of the antagonism between master and slave. And why, for the Critical Critics, is there wealth and poverty? So that Bruno Bauer and his Holy Family of philosophers can contemplate it.

In place of this purely speculative search for the truth, Marx explains that abstract knowledge must not be counterposed to society. Rather, it must be a product of that society:

All communist and socialist writers proceeded from the observation that, on the one hand, even the most favorably brilliant deeds [the French Revolution, for example--TC] seemed to remain without brilliant results, to end in trivialities, and, on the other, all progress of the Spirit [the Protestant Reformation, for example--TC] had so far been progress against the mass of mankind, driving it into an ever more dehumanizedsituation. They therefore declared "progress" (see Fourier) to be an inadequate, abstract phrase; they assumed (see Owen among others) a fundamental flaw in the civilized world; that is why they subjected the real foundations of contemporary society to incisive criticism.

That is, as the democratic promises of the English and French Revolutions were drowned in an orgy of capitalistic enrichment and brutality, early communist thinkers stopped looking for abstract truths or the perfect idea with which to overcome or smooth over the wretched state of society. Instead, they decided that society must be transformed from the bottom up. And as soon as they started to look for these concrete solutions, they found that their intellectual activity, unlike the Critical Critics, was not in opposition to "the mass," but could only grow up alongside and within that mass:

This communist criticism had practically at once as its counterpart the movement of a great mass, in opposition to which history had been developing so far. One must know the studiousness, the craving for knowledge, the moral energy and unceasing urge for development of the French and English workers to be able to form an idea of the human nobility of this movement. (p. 84, CW, Vol. 4)

Marx does not clearly link this discussion back to his earlier assertions about the "necessity" of the proletariat fulfilling its "being," and so leaves us with a question. Does it matter if the workers are "studious" or not? Or will their social conditions force them to become revolutionaries however they may "regard" themselves.

I think it safe to say that Marx is fighting on two fronts that are not quite connected: First, he believes that by applying Hegel's dialectic philosophy of change to material conditions (the economy), he is able to prove that communism is a historical necessity; and, second, flesh and blood, living and breathing, working-class individuals are just as capable of learning and producing knowledge as the philosophers are, and their actions ought to inspire, as opposed to repel, any intellectual concerned with justice and truth.

In other words, communism is necessary and the workers want it. Look out, world! A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism...but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

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HAVING DISPENSED with Bruno Bauer's conception of timeless truths as a series of revelations blooming in the minds of philosophers, Marx seeks to apply this insight to a practical historical case.

For European radicals in the 1840s, the great French Revolution of 1789 remained a revolutionary inspiration, pointing to the potential for dramatic social change. Bauer himself addresses it--however, according to Marx, he views it principally as a backdrop against which to work out his ideas. Or as Marx puts it [7], Bauer only considers the French Revolution as "figments of its own brain." (p. 118-119, CW, Vol. 4)

Contrasting his method to that of the Critical Critics, Marx argues that, "ideas can never lead beyond an old world order, but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas, men are needed who can exert practical force."

Contrasting his conclusion to that of Bauer, Marx writes that "it was not the revolutionary movement as a whole that became the prey of Napoleon on 18 Brumaire [the date when Napoleon launched his coup d'état--TC], as Criticism [suggests, but rather]...it was the liberal bourgeoisie." (p. 123, CW, Vol. 4)

Marx claims that the concept of the "Revolution" is not specific enough. In its place, he analyzes not only the contending classes, but even sections of those classes (the liberal versus the conservative or apolitical sections of the bourgeoisie) and their specific interests within the political process. Rather than simply considering the political slogan "the rights of man," Marx seeks the class content of the Revolution. Under Napoleon, he wrote:

a storm and stress of commercial enterprise, a passion for enrichment; the exuberance of the new bourgeois life, whose first self-enjoyment is pert, lighthearted, frivolous and intoxicating...the first moves of industry that have now become free--these were some of the signs of life of the newly emerged bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is positively represented by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, begins its rule. The rights of man cease to exist merely in theory." (p. 123, CW, Vol. 4)

If Bauer sees only hypocrisy in Napoleon's dictatorship and seeks to explain it merely at the level of philosophy (perhaps the language or concepts in the slogan rights of man were inadequate?), Marx explains why only a semblance (remember this from above?) of the Revolution's ideals can take root under the new bourgeois rulers of France.

Under the king, there could be no consideration at all of the "rights of man." If under the bourgeoisie, those rights are only partially applied--and not forgetting that the rights of woman are not even mentioned--then that only goes to show that a new class with radical chains must, in turn, overcome the bourgeoisie.

No one with any sense would argue that The Holy Family is an easy read. If nothing else, Engels probably learned the dangers of leaving Marx alone with his thoughts for long periods of time. In fact, one of Engels' principal tasks over the next 40 years would be editing Marx's writings into publishable form. Yet even if Marx found only a tiny audience for this book, it helped him work out his ideas about working-class revolution, knowledge as a social product, and history as a series of battles between contending classes.

Over the coming months, Engels would add living color to Marx's theoretical sketches. Back home in Germany, Engels sat down amid a mountain of sources from his time in Manchester to write one of the most remarkable books in the history of muckraking. The Condition of the English Working Class puts Engels in the same league as Jack London, Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein when it comes to exposing the blood and guts of capitalist profiteering. It's also a great read.

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AS USUAL, The Condition of the English Working Class is available at the Marxist Internet Archive [8]. You can also order it on Amazon for a few bucks, including a 99 cent Kindle version!

I suggest reading the whole book and just skimming over the long parts describing various branches of industry. However, it is about 300 pages long, so concentrate on these chapters: Introduction (15 pages), The Industrial Proletariat (first four pages), The Great Towns (first four pages), Irish Immigration (four pages), Results (first four pages), Factory Hands (first 12 pages), Labor Movement (18 pages), Attitude of the Bourgeoisie (last three pages). That's about 66 pages.

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Columnist: Todd Chretien

Todd Chretien is a long-time Bay Area activist. He contributes frequently to the International Socialist Review [9] and to Socialist Worker on the topics of U.S. and Latin American politics and the ideas of the Marxist tradition.

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Series: Reading Marx [10]

In this series, Todd Chretien provides an accompaniment to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

All articles in this series [11]

Reading Marx and Engels

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Praxis makes perfect

From the belly of the beast

What do ideas do?

About Me