Marx-ism? Or, thinking the crisis in (Marx’s) thought
Justin Spiegel
Platypus Review 174 | March 2025
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
— Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)[1]
ONE COMMON REJOINDER to Marx’s famous declaration in his last thesis on Feuerbach, raised by Heidegger among others, could be stated roughly as follows: to raise the demand of changing the world is to do so based on a philosophical interpretation of how the world ought to be changed. Therefore, Marx’s statement, which appears on its face anti-philosophical, in fact presupposes philosophy. This hidden presupposition creates an unsustainable contradiction in the sentence: how might one abandon philosophy, if one nevertheless needs philosophy in order to construct the very program for its abandonment? Philosophy, then, would seem inescapable as a register of change: whatever new phenomena one tries to introduce in the world would first need to be formulated. To act differently, one must first think differently. And one cannot think differently without thinking philosophically.
Taken in one sense, such a rejoinder is plausible: Marx’s 11th thesis is by no means anti-philosophical. But neither is it merely philosophy.
Now, how could this be so? To ask that question is to begin mapping a complex relationship between Marxism and philosophy, which found high expression in the crisis of Second International Marxism at the turn of the 20th century. In 1923, Karl Korsch formulated this relationship in terms of the process by which Marx “surpassed the merely philosophical standpoint of his student days,” but which nevertheless retained “a philosophical character.”[2] The rest of this essay will explore the substance of that distinction, in terms of the reified social relations of capitalism — the theoretical comprehension of which, for Marx, related dialectically to the practical demand for change. I argue that it is not a question of the kind of thinking that could “ground” world change; rather, it is a question of praxis: of the real coincidence of thinking and being, theory and practice, which Marx located in the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. This question in turn is connected, through the category of crisis, to the question of philosophical change in Marx’s thought, as exemplified in later disputes about the existence of a “break” between the early and late Marx.
Centrally, I argue that apparent changes in Marx’s thought remain mediated by the history that followed Marx, viz., by the crisis of Marx-ism. The crisis in Marx’s own thought was thus repeated posthumously on the world stage, between Marx’s students and their students, in the revisionist dispute of the Second International. Further, this crisis embodied the crisis of thought itself in capitalism; and to try to think such a crisis in thought is inevitably to raise the demand for revolution.
Korsch raises “three reasons why we can speak of a surpassal of the philosophical standpoint” in Marx. First, Marx is in total opposition to the premises of (Hegelian) philosophy; second, Marx did not just oppose philosophy but rather “the world as a totality”; finally, “this opposition is not just theoretical but is also practical and active.”[3] Philosophy was one medium among others through which to voice opposition to the social totality: “[The dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels] is a revolutionary philosophy whose task is to participate in the revolutionary struggles waged in all spheres of society against the whole of the existing order, by fighting in one specific area – philosophy. Eventually, it aims at the concrete abolition of philosophy as part of the abolition of bourgeois social reality as a whole, of which it is an ideal component.”[4] But this demand to abolish philosophy does not entail its one-sided rejection, nor a cessation of consideration for philosophical problems:
Thus the practical political party in Germany is justified in demanding the negation of philosophy. Their error consists not in their demand, but in being content with the demand that they do not and cannot really meet. They believe that they can complete that negation by turning their back on philosophy and murmuring at her with averted head some vexations and banal phrases. Their limited vision does not count philosophy as part of German reality or even fancies that it is beneath the level of German practice and the theories that serve it. You demand that we start from the real seeds of life, but forget until now the real seed of the German people has only flourished inside its skull. In a word: you cannot transcend philosophy without realizing it.[5]
The errors of the “practical political party” in Germany formed one side of an antinomy, the other side of which was formed by Germany’s theoretical political party, which committed the opposite error: believing that philosophy can be realized without being transcended or abolished. It is this dialectical relation of Marxism and philosophy, bound up in the demand for its realization as well as abolition, that Korsch argues came to be forgotten by leading theorists of the Second International, in parallel with the forgotten relation of Marxism and the state. The dispute within the Marxist camp, between orthodox and revisionist Marxists, marked the extent to which both these relations had been forgotten, yet demanded remembering in order to keep pace with revolutionary developments in reality. The assimilation of Marxist theory into bourgeois social science, characteristic of the vulgar Marxism of the Second International, reflected an actual schism in the party between theory and practice that revolutionary Marxism tried to bridge. In Korsch’s formulation: “The scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, correctly understood, stands in far greater contrast to these pure sciences of bourgeois society (economics, history or sociology) than it does to the philosophy in which the revolutionary movement of the Third Estate once found its highest theoretical expression.”[6]
But what is meant by this close-knit relationship of Marxist theory and practice to the radical bourgeois philosophy of the Third Estate — in short, to Hegel? Georg Lukács writes as follows on the nature of Marx’s method:
Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. . . . On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.[7]
This method, Lukács further argues, is the dialectic that Marx inherits from Hegel. The basic essence of this, let alone any, dialectic, according to Korsch, is that it is characterized by “the coincidence of consciousness and reality.”[8] “Ideology,” in other words, constitutes a real material force; it too partakes in reality, like the material base that it formalizes. Bourgeois forms of thought, then, are not simply shams or illusions, but rather are constitutive for the reality they take themselves as reflecting. These forms of thought are related to reality as parts to the whole, i.e., as to a concrete totality: “Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality. This knowledge starts from the simple (and to the capitalist world), pure, immediate, natural determinants described above. It progresses from them to the knowledge of the concrete totality, i.e. to the conceptual reproduction of reality.”[9] One can find a similar formulation by Marx in the Grundrisse: “The concrete is concrete because it is a combination of many determinations, i.e. a unity of diverse elements. In our thought it therefore appears as a process of synthesis, as a result, and not as a starting-point, although it is the real starting-point and, therefore, also the starting-point of observation and conception.”[10]
For bourgeois thought, the simple, abstract determinants of political economy, for example, appear as the result of an analysis that begins with “a chaotic conception of the whole,”[11] such as population, and reduces it to its basic constituents. Afterwards, the task is to integrate these determinants back into a concrete totality, i.e., into a whole that is no longer chaotic.
It is this dialectical method that Marx inherits from Hegel, according to Lukács. But Marx also distinguishes his approach from Hegel’s along the following lines: “Hegel fell into the error, therefore, of considering the real as the result of self-coordinating, self-absorbed, and spontaneously operating thought, while the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is but the way of thinking by which the concrete is grasped and is reproduced in our mind as concrete. It is by no means, however, the process which itself generates the concrete.”[12]
Herein lies the key to understanding the relationship between Marx’s thought and Hegelian dialectic. This latter, i.e., the reproduction in thought of a concrete totality concentrating a diversity of determinations, is preserved, but the system in which it was ensconced, viz., the “self-development of thought,” is discarded. Dialectic is taken by Marx, not as the form in which thought reproduces itself, but as a reflection — and by no means a passive one — of historical reality itself, caught up in a total process of change.
The point of revolutionary activity, as set forth in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” is therefore to enable the actual process of change constitutive of history to coincide with the consciousness of that process: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”[13] Forms of thought do not precede or ground change, but can be made to reflect extant changes, thereby leading these changes in a revolutionary direction. In reply to the rejoinder introduced above, one can simply say that the world changes already, no matter how we think about it.
So far, I have tracked a crucial continuity in Marx’s thought: his dialectical inheritance from Hegel, which he takes as a form of mediation of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. Clearly, however, Marx’s thought is not static. It undergoes change, as does the process of which it takes itself as a form of expression. It is, then, not altogether unjustified to posit a distinction between the early and late, or, as Korsch writes, between the “philosophical” and the “positive-scientific” Marx.[14] But what is the essence of this distinction? Korsch formulates it as follows:
Marx once said that a critic could ‘start with any form of philosophical and practical consciousness and develop from the specific forms of existent reality, its true reality and final end’. But he later became aware that no juridical relations, constitutional structures or forms of social consciousness can be understood in themselves or even in Hegelian or post-Hegelian terms of the general development of the human Spirit. For they are rooted in the material conditions of life that form ‘the material basis and skeleton’ of social organization as a whole. A radical critique of bourgeois society can no longer start from ‘any’ form of theoretical or practical consciousness whatever, as Marx thought as late as 1843. It must start from the particular forms of consciousness which have found their scientific expression in the political economy of bourgeois society.[15]
Marx’s turn to the critique of political economy, marked by the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, is characteristic of his changed relation to philosophy following 1843. The rootedness of forms of thought in “the material conditions of life” necessitates political economy as a starting-point for critique. Nevertheless, for Marx, the critique of political economy “never ceases to be a critique of the whole of bourgeois society and so of all its forms of consciousness.”[16] Marx retains, in his turn to the critique of political economy, the same sense of concrete totality that informed his earlier work. This is exemplified in Marx’s sixth thesis: “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”[17]
Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” were an attempt to address what Korsch notes many bourgeois historians of philosophy and philosophers of history have covered up: the connection between the decay and putrescence of the Hegelian system in the mid-19th century, on one hand, and the acceleration of the proletarian movement around that time, on the other.[18] The relation of Hegel and Marx was necessarily elided by those who took the history of philosophy as an ideal history, cordoned off from the real movements of the world. Marx’s Theses took the decay of the Hegelian system — its splitting-apart into the contrary determinations of “materialism” and “idealism,” being and essence — as a form of expression of a deeper crisis, which demanded practical prosecution through revolutionary activity. Thus, it is no surprise that theorists of Third International Marxism such as Lukács and Korsch appear to be “returning” to the Theses, as an indispensable expression of the revolutionary dialectic in Marx’s thought. This apparent return is involved in a broader discussion of “reification” and of the relation of Marxism to bourgeois “criticism” or social sciences. Korsch’s and Lukács’s essays, after all, were intended largely for bourgeois audiences who were dissatisfied with the vulgarization, the empty, abstract materialism, of Marxism in the Second International. These essays, then, were a rallying cry for bourgeois intellectuals around the Third International in the wake of Marxism’s internal crisis; they were not passive reflections of reality, any more than were Marx’s Theses themselves.
Lukács begins his essay on reification with a discussion of the commodity relation as the dominant category of capitalist social life:
It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of the commodity-structure. That is to say, the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.[19]
Marx turns to the commodity relation as a phenomenon — necessary form of appearance — of capitalism in its totality. Yet to grasp the commodity relation as such, for Marx, is not to alter its essential character:
The fact that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value — this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.[20]
The commodity relation is not simply a stepladder to a more substantive understanding of capitalism, any more than one ceases to have use for science after discovering its basic laws. As a necessary phenomenon, it cannot be recognized and then discarded in favor of contemplation of a truer, underlying metaphysical reality. Rather, the recognition of the fetishism inherent in the commodity relation points beyond itself, not to another theory, but to revolutionary practice. Lukács discusses the dialectical interrelations of the phenomena of capitalism, as well as the revolutionary demands raised by the recognition of these interrelations, in Marx’s Capital (1867):
In this respect, superficial readers imprisoned in the modes of thought created by capitalism, experienced the gravest difficulties in comprehending the structure of thought in Capital. For on one hand, Marx’s account pushes the capitalist nature of all economic forms to their furthest limits, he creates an intellectual milieu where they can exist in their purest form by positing a society ‘corresponding to the theory’, i.e. capitalist through and through, consisting of none but capitalists and proletarians. But conversely, no sooner does this strategy produce results, no sooner does this world of phenomena seem to be on the point of crystallizing out into theory than it dissolves into a mere illusion . . .[21]
The “point,” as it were, of Marx’s thought, its “dialectical nexus,” has a twofold character, consisting of “the simultaneous recognition and transcendence of immediate appearances.”[22] To recognize the commodity relation as a phenomenon of capitalism is thereby to recognize the absurdity of capitalism, taken as a totality, and to attempt to transcend it practically. It is thus not a new way of thinking that Marx’s thought suggests, but rather the dialectical realization and abolition of all old ways of thinking, together with the objective forms of social life to which they correspond.
Bourgeois thought itself remains unable to achieve such a sublation. The objective and subjective forms of bourgeois society remain necessarily unable to penetrate their material substratum, and this inability is the kernel of what Lukács calls reification:
the more intricate a modern science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back on the ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them from the realm where it has achieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp.[23]
The material substratum of science, consisting in real social relations, remains necessarily hidden behind phantomlike relations among the things that circumscribe science’s formal domain. Further, this process mirrors, within the domain of bourgeois thought, the commodity relation, in which “it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”[24]
Capitalism molds every form of life in its own image, viz., according to the commodity relation; moreover, Lukács describes reification as the process by which this very molding has penetrated into the movement for socialism itself. The Marxist party, in order to manage its own skyrocketing size, had to become a state within the state of sorts. Its internal functions came to resemble those of the capitalist state, in essence and appearance. A worker with a broken leg would see a proletarian doctor, then return home to read the proletarian newspaper. Organizing for socialism within the context of the capitalist state was not resolving, but was only deepening the crisis of bourgeois society, since now there existed two rival forms of management of bourgeois discontent: capitalism and socialism. This radical choice found expression within the Marxist party itself, in the form of a dispute between revisionist and orthodox Marxists. The former wanted to assimilate Marxism back into a passive, contemplative bourgeois social science, a move that Lukács takes as the starting point for his analysis of reification. Within the latter, orthodox camp was another division, between the Center and Left. The Center rejected the revisionist criticism of Marxism as un-Marxist and therefore unworthy of serious consideration, whereas the revolutionary Left took it as an expression of the objective ripeness of the world for socialism. The Center therefore postponed the task of revolution into the nebulous future, whereas the Left took revisionism as a sign of a threat that the party might be reabsorbed by, and hence inherit, the capitalist state; it thus approached the task of revolution with new urgency and under the guise of a return to the authentic Marxism of Marx and Engels.
In the Marxism of the Second International, therefore, the crisis in Marx’s thought was posed as a crisis of reality itself. Thought could no longer think through the reality that had produced it, and this incapacity of thinking found expression in the inexorable choice, socialism or barbarism? The revolutionary Marxists of the Second and Third Internationals acted under full knowledge of the disastrous consequences of their undertaking, should they fail. We ourselves live in the continuation and deepening of those consequences. The question, then, is this: might the Left renew its courage to fail again? |P
[1] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McClellan, second ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173.
[2] Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (Monthly Review Press, 2009), 66.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 67–68.
[5] Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1843), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 76.
[6] Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, 61–62.
[7] Georg Lukács, “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919), in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 1.
[8] Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, 77–78.
[9] Lukács, “Orthodox Marxism,” 8.
[10] Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 386.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 172.
[14] Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, 77.
[15] Ibid., 74–75.
[16] Ibid., 75.
[17] Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 172.
[18] Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, 37–38.
[19] Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923), in History and Class Consciousness, 83.
[20] Karl Marx, “From Capital, Volume One: On the Fetishism of Commodities,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 475.
[21] Lukács, “Orthodox Marxism,” 8.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Lukács, “Reification,” 104.
[24] Marx, “On the Fetishism of Commodities,” 473.
