Marxist humanism


Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in an interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.
Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Marxist humanists contend that there is continuity between the early philosophical writings of Marx, in which he develops his theory of alienation, and the structural description of capitalist society found in his later works such as Capital. They hold that it is necessary to grasp Marx's philosophical foundations to properly understand his later works.
Contrary to the official dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union and to interpretations of Marx rooted in the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Marxist humanists argue that Marx's work, rather than being an outright rejection, was an extension or transcendence of enlightenment humanism, extending humanist critique into the realm of human organization rather than limiting it to the critique of religion.

Origins

The beginnings of Marxist humanism lie with the publication of György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy in 1923. In these books, Lukács and Korsch proffer a Marxism that emphasizes the Hegelian basis of Karl Marx's thought. Marxism is not simply a theory of political economy that improves on its bourgeois predecessors. Nor is it a scientific sociology, akin to the natural sciences. Marxism is primarily a critique – a self-conscious transformation of society.
Korsch's book underscores Marx's doctrine of the unity of theory and practice, viewing Marxism as the "realization of philosophy". The most important essay in Lukács's collection introduces the concept of "reification" – the act of transforming human properties into the properties of man-produced things which have become independent of man and govern his life. Lukács argues that elements of this concept are implicit in the analysis of commodity fetishism found in Marx's magnum opus Capital. Bourgeois society loses sight of the role of human action in the creation of social meaning. It thinks value is immanent in things and regards persons as commodities.
The writings of Antonio Gramsci are also extremely important in the development of a humanist understanding of Marxism. Insisting on Marx's debt to Hegel, Gramsci sees Marxism as a "philosophy of praxis" and an "absolute historicism" that transcends both traditional materialism and traditional idealism.
The first publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932 greatly changed the reception of his work. This early work of Marx – written in 1844 – situated his relationship to the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach, his relationship to political economy, and his views on communism, within a new theoretical framework. In the Manuscripts, Marx borrows philosophical terminology from Hegel and Feuerbach to posit a critique of capitalist society based in "alienation". Through his own activity, man becomes alien from his human possibilities: to the products of his own activity, to the nature in which he lives, to other human beings and to himself. The concept is not merely descriptive, it is a call for de-alienation through radical change of the world. On publication, the importance of this work was recognized by Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre. In the period after the Second World War, the texts were translated into Italian and discussed by Galvano Della Volpe. The philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre were also drawn to Marxism by the Manuscripts at this time. In 1961, a volume containing an introduction by Erich Fromm was published in the USA.
As they provided a missing link between the Hegelian philosophical humanism of Marx's early writings and the economics of the later Marx, Marx's Grundrisse were also an important source for Marxist humanism. This work – a 1,000 page collection of Marx's working notes for Capital – was first published in Moscow in 1939, and became available in an accessible addition in 1953. Several analysts have commented that the Grundrisse shows the role played by the early Marx's concerns with alienation and the Hegelian concept of dialectic in the formation of his magnum opus.

Currents

In the aftermath of the occupation of France and the Second World War, the independent leftist journal Les Temps modernes was founded in 1946. Among its original editorial board were the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While both leant support to the politics and tactics of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union during this period, they concurrently attempted to formulate a phenomenological and existential Marxism that opposed the Stalinist version. The failure of the Western Communist Parties to lead successful revolutions and the development of an authoritarian state structure in the Soviet Union were both, in their view, connected to the "naturalism" and "scientism" of the official orthodox Marxist theory. Orthodox Marxism is not a theory of revolutionary self-emancipation but a self-proclaimed science that imposes a direction upon history from above in the name of irrefutable "iron laws". Against this, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty argued for a subject-centered view of history that emphasized the lived experience of historical actors as the source of cognition.
In 1939, Henri Lefebvre, then a member of the French Communist Party, published Dialectical Materialism. This book, written in 1934-5, advanced a reconstruction of Marx's oeuvre in the light of the 1844 Manuscripts. Lefebvre argued here that Marx's dialectic was not a "Dialectics of Nature" but was instead based on concepts of alienation and praxis. In the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Lefebvre - together with Kostas Axelos, Jean Duvignaud, Pierre Fougeyrollas and Edgar Morin - founded the journal Arguments. This became the centre of a Marxist humanist critique of Stalinism. In his theory of alienation, Lefebvre drew not only from the Manuscripts, but also from Sartre, to proffer a critique that encompassed the styles of consumption, culture, systems of meaning and language under capitalism.
Starting in the late 1950s, Roger Garaudy, for many years the chief philosophical spokesman of the French Communist Party, offered a humanistic interpretation of Marx stemming from Marx's early writings that called for dialogue between Communists and existentialists, phenomenologists and Christians.

The period following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 saw a number of movements for liberalization in Eastern Europe. Following Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech, where he denounced "Stalinism", Marx's 1844 Manuscripts were used as the basis for a new "socialist humanism" in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Petofi Circle, which included some of Lukács's disciples, was a centre of what was termed "revisionism" in Hungary. In 1959, the Polish writer Leszek Kołakowski published an article "Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth" that drew a sharp distinction between the theory of knowledge found in the works of the young Marx and the theory found in Engels and Lenin. This challenge was taken up by Adam Schaff - a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party - and expanded into an investigation into the persistence of alienation in socialist societies.
The Czechoslovak Karel Kosik also began the critique of communist dogmatism that would develop into his Dialectics of the Concrete, and would eventually land him in jail.
This period also saw the formation of a humanist Marxism by Yugoslav philosophers Mihailo Markovic and Gajo Petrovic that would come to act as the basis of the Praxis School. From 1964 to 1975, this group published a philosophical journal, Praxis, and organized annual philosophical debates on the island of Korčula. They concentrated on themes such as alienation, reification and bureaucracy.

In Britain, the New Left Review was founded from an amalgamation of two earlier journals, The New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review, in 1959. Its original editorial team – E. P. Thompson, John Saville and Stuart Hall – were committed to a socialist humanist perspective until their replacement by Perry Anderson in 1962.

Philosophy

Marxist humanism opposes the philosophy of "dialectical materialism" that was orthodox among the Soviet-aligned Communist Parties. Following the synthesis of Hegel's dialectics and philosophical materialism in Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring, the Soviets saw Marxism as a theory not just of society but of reality as a whole. Engels's book is a work of what he calls "natural philosophy" and not one of science. Nonetheless, he claims that discoveries within the sciences tend to confirm the scientific nature of his theory. This world-view is instantiated within both the natural and social sciences.
Marxist humanists reject an understanding of society based on natural science, viewing Marxist theory as not primarily scientific but philosophical. Marxist humanism asserts the centrality and distinctiveness of people and society. Social science is not another natural science and people and society are not instantiations of universal natural processes. Rather, people are subjects - centres of consciousness and values - and science is an embedded part of the totalizing perspective of humanist philosophy. Echoing the themes of Marx's thought inherited from German Idealism, Marxist humanism holds that reality does not exist independently of human knowledge, but is partly constituted by it. Because human social practice has a purposive, transformative character, it requires a mode of understanding different from the detached, empirical observation of the natural sciences. A theoretical understanding of society should instead be based in empathy with or participation in the social activities it investigates.

Alienation

In line with this, Marxist humanism treats alienation as one of Marxism's central concepts. In his early writings, the young Marx advances a critique of modern society on the grounds that it impedes human flourishing. He elucidates a theory of alienation that has "subjective" and "objective" variants. Alienation is "subjective" when individuals feel "estranged" or do not feel at home in the modern social world. Individuals are objectively alienated when they do not develop their essential human capacities. For Marx, the latter is the cause of the former: individuals experience their lives as lacking meaning or fulfilment because society does not promote the deployment of their human capacities.

In the state

The earliest appearance of this concept in Marx's corpus is the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right from 1843. Drawing a contrast between the forms of community in the ancient and medieval worlds and the individualism of modern civil society, Marx characterizes the modern social world as "atomistic". Modern civil society does not sustain the individual as a member of a community. Where in medieval society people are motivated by the interest of their estate, an unimpeded individualism is the principle that underpins modern social life. Marx's critique does not rest with civil society; he also holds that the modern political state is distinguished by its "abstract" character. While the state acknowledges the communal dimension of human flourishing, its existence has a "transcendental remoteness" separate from the "real life" of civil society. The state resolves the alienation of the modern world, but in an inadequate manner.

In Hegel

In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx develops his critique of Hegel. Marx here praises Hegel's dialectic for its view of labor as an alienating process: alienation is a historical stage that must be passed through for the development and deployment of essential human powers. For Hegel, alienation is the state of consciousness as it acquaints itself with the external, objective, phenomenal world. Humanity creates itself by externalizing its own essence, developing through a process of alienation alternating with transcendence of alienation. Consciousness emancipates itself from alienation by recognizing that what appears as an external object is a projection of consciousness itself. Marx criticizes Hegel for this: since Hegel understands labor as "abstract mental labor", Man's integration with nature takes places on a spiritual level and is thus an abstraction and an illusion.

In Feuerbach

The main influence on Marx's thinking in this regard is Ludwig Feuerbach, who in his Essence of Christianity aims to overcome the harm and distress of the separation of individuals from their essential human nature. For Feuerbach, the alienation of modern individuals is caused by their holding false beliefs about God. Individuals misidentify as an objective being what is a man-made projection of their own essential predicates. Christian belief thus means the sacrifice, the practical denial or repression, of essential human characteristics.
This critique extends beyond religion, as Feuerbach argues in his Theses on the Reform of Philosophy that Hegelian philosophy is itself alienated. Hegel regards alienation as affecting thought or consciousness and not humanity in its material being. For Hegel, concrete, finite existence is merely a reflection of a system of thought or consciousness. Hegel starts and ends with the infinite. The finite - Man's essence - is present as only a phase in the evolution a human spirit, the Absolute. In contrast to this, Feuerbach believes Man is alienated because he mediates a direct relationship of sensuous intuition to concrete reality through religion and philosophy. By recognizing that his relationship to nature is instead one of immediate unity, Man can attain a "positive humanism" that is more than just a denial of religion.

In work

Following Feuerbach, Marx places the earthly reality of Man in the centre of this picture. Where Hegel sees labor as spiritual activity, Marx sees labor as physical commerce with nature: in nature, man creates himself and creates nature. Where Hegel identifies human essence with self-consciousness, Marx articulates a concept of species-being, according to which man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing his own conditions of life.
Man's nature is to be his own creator, to form and develop himself by working on and transforming the world outside him in cooperation with his fellow men. Man should be in control of this process, but in modern conditions, where land-ownership is subject to the laws of a market economy, individuals do not fulfill themselves through productive activity: their labor, their personal qualities of muscle and brain, their abilities and aspirations, appear to them as things, commodities to be bought and sold like any other. Much as Feuerbach sees religion as an alienating invention of the human mind, so does Marx believe the modern productive process to reduce the human being to the status of a commodity. In religion, God holds the initiative and man is in a state of dependence. In economics, money moves men around as though they were objects instead of the reverse. Marx claims that human individuals are alienated in four ways: 1) from their products, 2) from their productive activity, 3) from other individuals and 4) from their own nature.
Firstly, the product of a worker’s labor confronts him "as an alien object that has power over him". A worker has bestowed life on an object which now confronts him as hostile and alien. The worker creates an object, which appears to be his property. However, he now becomes its property. Where in earlier historical epochs, one person ruled over another, now the thing rules over the person, the product over the producer. Secondly, the worker relates to the process by which this product is created as something alien that does not belong to him. His work typically does not fulfill his natural talents and spiritual goals and is experienced instead as "emasculation". Thirdly, the worker experiences mutual estrangement - alienation from other individuals. Each individual regards others as a means to his own end. Concern for others exists mainly in the form of a calculation about the effect those others have on his own narrow self-interest. Fourthly, the worker experiences self-estrangement, alienation from his human nature. Because work is a means to survival only, the worker does not fulfill his human need for self-realization in productive activity. Modern labor turns the worker's essence as a producer into something "alien".
Marx mentions other features of alienated labor: overwork, i.e. the amount of time that the modern worker has to spend engaged in productive activity; "more and more one-sided" development of the worker, i.e. the lack of variety in his activity; the machine-like character of labor and the intellectual stunting that results from the neglect of mental skills in productive activity.
The capitalist does not escape the process of alienation. Just as the worker is reduced to an animal condition, so is the capitalist reduced to an abstract money-power. His human qualities are transformed into a personification of the power of money.
To overcome alienation and allow humankind to realize its species-being, the wage-labor system must be transcended, and the separation of the laborer from the means of labor abolished. In his Notes on James Mill, Marx offers some indication as to what unalienated labor might look like. He claims that in self-realizing work, one's personality would be made objective in one's product and that one would enjoy contemplating that feature in the object one produces. As one has expressed one's talents and abilities in the productive process, the activity is authentic to one's character. It ceases to be an activity one loathes. Marx further claims that one gains immediate satisfaction from the use and enjoyment of one's product - the satisfaction arising from the knowledge of having produced an object that corresponds to the needs of another human being. One can be said to have created an object that corresponds to the needs of another's essential nature. One's productive activity is a mediator between the needs of another person and the entire species. Because individuals play this essential role in the affirmation of each other's nature, Marx suggests this confirms the "communal" character of human nature.

In division of labor

In the German Ideology, Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels provide an account of alienation as deriving from division of labor. Alienation is said to arise from improvements in tools, which in turn lead to commerce. Man transforms objects produced by man into commodities - vehicles for abstract exchange-value. Division of labor and exchange relations subsume individuals in classes, subordinating them to forces with which they have no choice but to comply. Alienated processes appear to individuals as if they were natural processes. Physical and mental work are also separated from each other, giving rise to self-deluded ideologists who believe their thoughts have an inherent validity and are not dictated by social needs.
Marx and Engels here attack Feuerbach for advancing an "essentialist" account of human nature that reduces real historical men to a philosophical category. They argue that it is not a philosophical concept that makes history, but real individuals in definite historical conditions.

In property

In the Grundrisse, Marx continues his discussion of the problem of alienation in the context of political economy. Marx views political economy as a reflection of the alienated consciousness of bourgeois society. It mystifies human reality by transforming the production of commodities into "objective" laws which independently regulate human activity. The human subject is made into the object of his own products.
Marx here builds on his earlier conception of man as a productive, object-creating being: the production of objects must be emancipated from the alienated form given to it by bourgeois society. He argues that alienation did not exist in earlier periods - primitive communism - where wealth was still conceived as residing in natural objects and not man-made commodities. However, such societies lacked the creation of objects by purposive human activity. They cannot be a model for a fully-developed communism that realizes human potentiality. Marx further criticizes political economy for its division of man's time between work and leisure. This argument misunderstands the nature of human activity. Labor is not naturally coercive. Rather, the historical conditions in which labor is performed frustrate human spontaneity. Work should not be a mere means for man's existence, it should become the very contents of his life.
The Grundrisse also continues the discussion of private property that Marx began in the German Ideology. Marx's views on property stand in contrast to those of Hegel, who believed property realizes human personality through objectification in the external world. For Marx, property is not the realization of personality but its negation. The possession of property by one person necessarily entails its non-possession by another. Property is thus not to be assured to all, but to be abolished.
The first form of property, according to Marx, is tribal property. Tribal property originates in the capacity of a human group to gain possession of land. Tribal property precedes the existence of permanent settlement and agriculture. The act of possession is made possible by the prior existence of group cohesion, i.e. a social, tribal organization. Thus, property does not pre-date society but is a result of it. An individual's relation to property is mediated through membership of the group. It is a form of unalienated property that realizes man's positive relationship to his fellow tribesmen. This relationship, however, limits the individual's power to establish a self-interest distinct from the general interest of society. This primitive type of common ownership disappears with the development of agriculture.
The unity of the individual and society is preserved by more complex societies in two distinct forms: oriental despotism and the classical polis. In oriental despotism, the despot personifies society - all property belongs to him. In the polis, the basic form of property is public. Economic activity depends on community-oriented considerations. Political rights depend on participation in common ownership of land. Agriculture is considered morally and publicly superior to commerce. Public agricultural policy is judged on its ability to produce more patriotic citizens, rather than economic considerations. Alienation between the public and private sphere does not exist in the polis.
Marx does not idealize the polis or call for its restoration. Its foundation on naturalistic matter is specific and limited. Marx opposes to this the universality of capital. Capital is objectified human labor: on the one hand it indicates hidden human potentialities but on the other its appearance is accompanied by alienation. Capitalism develops a kind of property free from social limitations and considerations. Concurrently, capitalism ends individual private property as traditionally conceived, in that it divorces the producer from the ownership of the means of production. Such property is at the exclusive disposition of its owner. Yet, the development of capitalist society also entails more complex production, requiring combined efforts that cannot be satisfied by individual property.

Criticism

As the terminology of alienation does not appear in Marx's later works such as Capital, Marxist humanism has been quite controversial within Marxist circles. The tendency was attacked by the Italian Western Marxist Galvano Della Volpe and by Louis Althusser, the French Structuralist Marxist. Althusser criticizes Marxist humanists for not recognizing what he considers to be the fundamental dichotomy between the theory of the "Young Marx" and the "Mature Marx". Althusser holds that Marx's thought is marked by a radical epistemological break, to have occurred in 1845 — The German Ideology being the earliest work to betray the discontinuity. For Althusser, the humanism of Marx's early writings—an ethical theory—is fundamentally incongruous with the "scientific", structure-concerned theory he argues is to be found in Marx's later works. In his view, the Mature Marx presents the social relations of capitalism as relations within and between structures; individuals or classes have no role as the subjects of history.
Althusser believes socialist humanism to be an ethical and thus ideological phenomenon. Humanism is a bourgeois individualist philosophy that ascribes a universal essence of man that is the attribute of each individual and through which there is potential for authenticity and common human purpose. This essence does not exist: it is a formal structure of thought whose content is determined by the dominant interests of each historical epoch. The argument of socialist humanism rests on a similar moral and ethical basis. It reflects the reality of discrimination and exploitation that gives rise to it but never truly grasps it in thought. Marxist theory must go beyond this to a scientific analysis that directs to underlying forces such as economic relations and social institutions. For this reason, Althusser sympathized with the criticisms of socialist humanism made by the Chinese Communist Party, which condemned the tendency as "revisionism" and "phony communism".
Althusser sees Marxist theory as primarily science and not philosophy but he does not adhere to Engels's "natural philosophy". He claims that the philosophy implicit in Marxism is an epistemology that sees science as "theoretical practice" and philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice". However, he later qualifies this by claiming that Marxist philosophy, unlike Marxist science, has normative and ideological elements; Marxist philosophy is "politics in the field of theory" and "class struggle in theory".
Althusser is critical of what he perceives to be a reliance among Marxist humanists on Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. Marxist humanists, however, strongly dispute this. They hold that the concept of alienation is recognizable in Marx's mature work even when the terminology has been abandoned. Teodor Shanin and Raya Dunayevskaya assert that not only is alienation present in the late Marx, but that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between the "young Marx" and "mature Marx". Marxist humanist activist Lilia D. Monzó states that "Marxist-Humanism considers the totality of Marx's works, recognizing that his early work in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, was profoundly humanist and led to and embeds his later works, including Capital."
Contra Althusser, Leszek Kołakowski argues that although it is true that in Capital Marx treats individuals as mere embodiments of functions within a system of relations apparently possessed of its own dynamic and created independently, he does so not as a general methodical rule, but as a critique of the dehumanizing nature of exchange-value. When Marx and Engels present individuals as non-subjects subordinated to structures that they unwittingly support, their intention is to illuminate the absence of control that individuals have in bourgeois society. They do not see the domination of alien forces over individuals as an eternal truth, but rather as the very state of affairs to be ended by the overthrow of capitalism.

Marxist humanists

Notable thinkers associated with Marxist humanism include: