From: "Phil Walden" <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: Eleventh thesis on Feuerbach
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 13:16:26 -0000


I seem to remember that there is some dispute about Marx's original wording
of this thesis.  The versions vary in the importance they give to
philosophy.  I have seen:

(1)  The philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it.

which is possibly not anti-philosophy, right through to:

(2)  The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it.

which is completely anti-philosophy.

Whatever the truth of this may be, I think it is undeniable that Marx
underestimated the philosophical problems involved in achieving proletarian
revolution.  In particular, he thought that he had settled accounts with
Hegel when in fact Marx still needed Hegel to broaden his understanding of
alienation.  Hegel understood that alienation takes place primarily at the
level of ideology - hence Adorno's struggle against alienated ideology -
whereas for Marx this must have seemed an idealist intrusion on the struggle
against alienation in the labour process.  And Heidegger?  From what I have
read of him - BEING AND TIME  and other early works - Heidegger seems to
have been a prisoner of alienated ideology.  For one thing, he seems to
completely reject dialectics.

Phil Walden



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