cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/58586
Reviewing the fallout over Gabriel Rockhill’s critiques of Western Marxism, Donald Parkinson argues the controversy is ultimately a battle over what kind of intellectual culture the left needs.
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I think it’s really strange to read the main transitional aspect of TGI as Marx “working through his Hegelianism”/this being the main separation between it and Capital, when Marx never had any Hegelianism to work through, and only describes himself as a “disciple of Hegel” (/calls Hegel “my master”) in maturity; wrt alienation, Marx already basically lays out his mature conception of alienation in TGI as a feeling that drives the proletariat to revolution and as a necessary historical phase to create the productive forces necessary for communism (all this as opposed to alienation being a humanist value postulate, as in The Holy Family), and the further detail/development of the concept of alienation (in how it historically arises and manifests itself) in Capital has nothing to do with Marx having further thrown off his Hegelianism, it’s just a direct product of his further economic research where he stops being reliant on Smith (for TGI) and constructs his own political economy.
Is it better if I say idealism? Marx was trying to flesh out materialism but only had Feuerbach as any good example before him, and was trying to establish a rigorous materialism. So I consider that his Hegelianism he was still working through, but maybe it helps if we just say that Marx still had some idealism that he needed to work through to get to a rigorous materialism (dialectical, of course)?
You used the word “feeling” in your definition of alienation as described in TGI. Meanwhile the mature versions of Commodity fetishism and exploitation are direct relations to production that are measurable. I would call this advancing past a hegelianism towards a scientific notion
Marx managed to fully transcend Feuerbach through interacting with the social materialism of classical political economy, so it’s incorrect to say he didn’t have a better example. I would consider it “idealist” in the Marxist sense to see the lack of detail in Marx’s explication of alienation as explained by some inner “idealism” holding him back (there is something like this with dual textual discourse but it’s a reflection of Marx’s incomplete economics research); the reality is that he just did not have the information at this point for the detail/specificity seen in Capital.
Commodity fetishism is a feeling and an idea/appearance, and not a direct relation of production nor directly measurable. This is actually a good example to show that there is nothing un-Marxist/“idealist” about the notion of alienation as a feeling.
I see lacking in information to fully ground an idea as somewhere where idealism still lurks in the background. Im not condemning early Marx as not willing to get past his own hegelianism or idealism in critiquing terms, just literally saying that he still had a lifetime of throwing that shit off to go, and still at the end never could achieve it completely (looking at the unrigorous view of the state as a simple example). Im assigning no fault to him as a person or something. And of course he also had the English economists to follow for materialist analyses, I just mean in terms of people looking to assign philosophical rigour to materialism. Marx also was inspired by the materialism if Newton, Darwin, etc as scientists of course
I think commodity fetishism was something that Marx was working to make fully measurable and scientific (lacking information theory made this a monumental task). You can directly measure the loss of information in the commodity production process leading to a prices as we know them in capitalist production. The amount of info lost is a measure of the fetishism which directly replaces it by assigning the magical trait (of secretly containing all relevamt info) to the commodity itself.
I also am not here to say feelings can’t be material, Im just saying that feelings are rigorous to base pur theories on. It’s not ‘bad’ per se, just not as useful as concrete, measurable, scientific arguments.
I see the notion of “materialism vs. idealism,” where “materialism” is more rigorous and “idealism” is characterized by unscientific/hazy theories that vanish as it becomes more “materialist” as completely incorrect; not to get too far off topic but Marx’s “materialism” is fundamentally less rigorous/scientific than pure idealism due to grounding reason in given determinacy (foundations), eliminating all possibility of scientific philosophy, which can also be seen in Capital resting on assumptions that prevent it from being a fully proper systematic formulation of economic life.
In TGI, and you can see this in my summary, this feeling of being dominated which drives the proletariat to revolution is a product of an objective historical inversion which is necessary to form the ground for communism (Marx also talks about this in the draft ch. 6 of Capital); the degree to which living labor becomes “enslaved” to its own creation (capital), i.e. is ~divorced from control over the objective conditions of labor, is the degree to which alienation is felt, and this is roughly reflected in the relative size of the proletariat as a class. It’s really no less scientific/concrete than the concept of commodity fetishism. Note that the measurement you’re talking about is also indirect.
It seems by rigour you mean something like “the ability for a theory to be a complete system without any sense of contradictions” but I think that being scientific is not related to that sense of rigour. I mean rigour as it being grounded in assumptions derived directly from material experience and describing further the material world. Hegels system was more rigorous in the old sense of philosophical rigour, but Marxs was more in the sense of having some direct explanatory power and being able to be used to impact the world.
It seems your measurement of alienation is more roundabout than the one for commodity fetishist (how did we get from ‘degree to which alienation is felt’ to '[quantity] of proletariat?)
And lastly, it seems you think of the feelings as someone experience them might be primary, you keep using the word feeling to describe alienation. Is it the feeling which drives the proletariat to action? Or the objective conditions which lead to diverse reasonings to revolutionary potential? (Though the draft for ch6 i am unfamiliar with, is that easy to find to read?)
No, I mean rigour in the sense of being free from given assumptions, allowing reason to be fully self-grounding; this is the only possibility for philosophical science, as soon as you proclaim that reason is unavoidably conditioned by some given (as Marx does in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital), you rule out the possibility of philosophical science and condemn philosophy to opinion. [explained further in lecture 1 here]
You can’t do philosophy in this way for the reason above and because you cannot derive from “material experience” that reason is conditioned by material experience, this is why empiricism isn’t philosophy.
The notion of a philosophy of praxis violates what (scientific) philosophy (described above) is, Hegel goes over this in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Maker also does so in ch. 8 of Philosophy Without Foundations but you have to take that with a grain of salt due to the non-metaphysical reading (and also some “doctrine of ‘whatever’”-ism (Yibing, Back to Marx, p. xxi), but that doesn’t matter for the argument).
Because the objective historical inversion where dead labor rules over the living is the process by which the proletariat (a class of propertyless laborers) comes into being and becomes the absolute majority (“For [alienation] to become an ‘intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless’, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture” (The German Ideology)). The degree to which alienation is felt/is is the degree to which a greater and greater amt of the population is rendered propertyless “cogs” in service of capital.
For Marx, it’s the feeling which drives the proletariat to action, but it’s a feeling of “the objective conditions,” which also provide the proletariat with “revolutionary potential” in terms of making communism objectively possible (“material basis”).
I think it’s important to emphasize the feelings side because, despite some things Marx and Engels have said (see “Four Letters by Engels on Historical Materialism”), within Marxism communism is not an inevitability mechanically resulting from the economic conditions of developed capitalism, the proletariat still must actualize their revolutionary potential to take hold of the immanent negativity within capitalism (i.e. there is a “subjective dimension”).
I also think you perfectly highlighted, in your two quotes, the difference that I’ve been arguing exists. The quote from Capital is much less ‘philosophical’ but more scientific than that from TGI.
I agree that there is some subjective feeling needed to set people into action, you will never see me arguing against that. It’s about the scientificity of that claim when argued in TGU vs later in e.g. Capital
Ah you’re a philosopher. I’ve studied Hegel too, I disagree entirely about the basis of what a science is. Chemistry is based on assumptions about the material world but is much more rigorous in scientific terms than Hegels science of logic, in the view I’m speaking of. And to be clear, I am a Hegel enthusiast, I find his works admirable and with kernels of amazing conclusions growing everywhere and explicated everywhere, too. But I think it’s a doomed effort to created assumptionless science. It’s fun to think about, but I’m talking about how to change the world
Agree to disagree, I already said what I had to say on this.