Date: Sun, 26 Jan 1997 00:23:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: M-I: The Marxian Dialectic Part 3 of 4


III. Objectified Reality.

Now, what can we take as the domain of objective (or objectified) reality
to which the dialectical method of Marx can be applied? Marx wrote that
humans make history, but not in a manner of our choosing. What did he mean
by this? He meant that humans, in producing and reproducing social
patterns, accumulate social structure, and that this structure (history
and culture) put constraints on our futrue activity. Thus social
construction (production) is both a material and an ideational process. 

Marx: "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven
to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not
set out from what men say, imagine, conceive.... We set out from real,
active men.... The phantoms formed in the human brain are also,
necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is
empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion,
metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of
consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence."

What is Marx talking about here? Let's remember what Marx means by
material: Humans humanize their world through the labor process. The
material life-process is social practice at its most foundational level.
The labor process in interaction with nature materializes the known and
knowable world. Marx regarded it irrelevant to speak of nature independent
of humans, because one cannot stand outside their humanity, even as the
most extreme points of self-alienation.

Marx: "Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and his
consciousness. He has conscious life-activity.... In creating an objective
world by his practical activity, in working up inorganic nature, man
proves himself a conscious species-being. It is just in the working-up of
the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be
a species being. This production is his active species life. Through and
because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality.
The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man's species
life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness,
intellectually, but also actively, in reality. and therefore he
contemplates himself in a world he created. In tearing away from man the
object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his
species life, his real species objectivity." [The same is true with the
objectification, reification, and alienation of science, which Siddharth
is guilty of.]

First, Marx is arguing that human beings say, imagine, and conceive laws,
truth, facts, etc.. Laws, truth, and facts are not self-objectifying. They
have a conceptual foundation that emerges from the real material life
process of human beings. A law is an interpretation of a slice of reality.
Marx applied dialectical analysis to reveal laws inherent in capitalist
society, and presented a general theory for all societies (presented at
the top of the present post). But Marx did not suppose, and I can only go
by what he wrote, that laws exist prior to human society and determine
that society. Every law in operation in any specific society is specific
to that society. This dismisses the possibility that there could be a
law, at least in Marx's work or consistent with it, that stands external
to a particular society that is working on that society. This means that
the laws of the dialectic do not jibe with Marxian thought. 

Second, Marx argues that rather than beginning with these ideas we should
begin with real active men, men in social relationship to one another
(human activity), and men in relationship to the productive means and
nature. This involves empirical investigation into social reality, one
that proceeds simultaneously in a deductive and inductive fashion, and is
always critical of the method being deployed. There is a double-reflexive
process operating in the historical materialist method: one level that
focuses on the object of study as a human production, another level that
focuses on way in which that object of studied is studied. 

Third, Marx argues that the ideas that men produce--e.g. laws, truth,
facts, etc.--are "necessarily sublimates of their material life-process,"
that is, the manner in which men reproduce their social world, through
labor and social interaction with other men, gives rise to their
ideational patterns. The dialectic is an ideational pattern. It therefore
reflects social relations. However, it does not reflect the physical or
biological substratum that makes being (or existence) possible. And this
is paramount to my argument. First, the biological. We know that
genetically human beings are only slightly variable among one another. Yet
the differences between human cultures and histories is vast. The slight
genetic dissimularities (really between individuals not groups) is
insufficient for the wide-range of cultural and historical variability
displayed in human societies. Therefore these novel emergences across the
span of space-time reflect the interplay of human social forces with a
dialectical character, *not* biological forces (in fact, it is awkward to
speak of biological forces). Secondly, the physical. Vulgar materialism
asserts that the "phantoms of our brains" arise from the atomic
arrangement in the composition of our brains. But here the variation is
atomic constitution is less variable that our genetic constitution
(variation in systems becomes greater at increasing complexity). Allow me
to make the silliness of these views explicit, and it will involve a
little abuse of Engels.

Should we suppose, as does Engels, in text he suppressed from
*Anti-Duhring* (which perhaps isn't fair of me to bring in edited text,
but it makes my point), that our thoughts directly reflect the atomic
organization of our bodies?

Engels: "The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are
subject to the same laws, and hence, too, that in the final analysis they
cannot contradict each other in their result, but must coincide, governs
absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and
unconditional premise for our theoretical thought." [Wait around, it gets
far worse that this.]

Here Engels admits his idealism. If subjective thought is subject to the
same laws as those laws that govern the objective world then human beings
are mere objects of universal laws of history and nature. We are, in every
event determined not by other humans in social interaction, but by
objective imperatives that lie external to our social beings, and hence
external to our knowledge. How is this possible if we all think so
differently then? Engels attempted to explain, following Lamarck (which I
imagine made Marx gringe) that human races acquire characteristics over
time, passing them down through generations. His example was that blacks
could not do math, because they had not acquired the characteristics to do
so (again, in all fairness, this text was as well censored from
*Anti-Duhring*). Let me quote Engels directly, because this does sound
rather unbelievable, I know. (This is from a long passage "On the
Prototypes of the Mathematical Infinite in the Real World.")

"Modern science has extended the principle of the origin of all thought
content from experience in a way that breaks down its old metaphysical
limitation and formulation. By recognizing the inheritance of acquired
characters, it extends the subject of experience from the individual to
genus; the single individual that must have experience is no longer
necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent
by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors. If, for
instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem self-evident to every
eight-year-old child, and in no need of proof from experience, this is
solely the result of 'accumulated inheritance.' It would be difficult to
teach by a proof to a bushman or Australian Negro." [Note: It might be
considered cruel to point out when Anti-Duhring was published, how Engels
ignores here what Darwin argued, and how these facts cast a pall over
Engels' graveyard comparison between Marx and Darwin. Which Darwin? The
one Engels fails to here understand? For me, this is damning for any
argument asserting Engels correct reckoning of science. Is this the
scientific view of Marxism that Siddharth advocates?]

So here Engels wants to say that conceptual systems, which are an exact
reflection of natural systems, both driven by the immutable laws of
nature, are innate, but he wants to avoid sounding like he is presenting a
rationalist argument, and thus avoid overt idealism. How silly. So he
appeals to a false theory, that of the genetic transmission of acquired
characteristics (which was Lamarkian evolutionary theory, rejected by
Engels' hero Darwin). And he even argued in this passage that blacks
could not learn these certain things because they did not have the genes
for it. (I am surprised Engels wasn't cited by Herrnstein and Murray!)

Absurd! These mathematical axioms are human constructions. The child
learns them from his culture. And blacks could learn them too if they were
in the same culture. Marx argues this point (see below). The ideological
superstructure is the result of the productive mode, emerging from the
force of production, the combined amalgamation of technological
contradictions and the dialectical interplay of social interactions
manifest in social class. Marx would never have naturalized these process
in nature by claiming that they appeared in our consciousness as the
product of biological evolution. This is why I go to such great lengths on
this day to purge Marxism of this view.

This is where dialectical materialism leads us. We cannot understand false
consciousness because it is impossible. If our thoughts reflect the
physical (including biological) substratum of our being then human though
should be the same everywhere and at all times. This is rationalism! The
notion that society is the aggregation of atomized individuals who all act
like a group because they think the same naturally! This is clearly false,
by any scientific method. This was one of Marx's actualy criticisms of
bourgeois science. This is where Engels' clumsy and inferior work does
Marx a disservice. 

Marx: "But philosophers do not grow like mushrooms, out of the earth; 
they are the outgrowth of their period, their nation, whose most subtle,
delicate and invisible juices abound in the philosophical ideas. The same
spirit that constructs the philosophical system in the mind of the
philosopher build the railways with the hands of the trade." 

Fourth, this phenomenon of human ideations arising out of the social
relations of man is based in the social relations themselves. They are
material. They are real. Not disembodied ideas like "truth" or "natural
law" etc. In fact, laws are written by men. Truth is a human construct
*because* it is an idea and therefore *cannot* be material. This should be
plain from the corpus of Marx's work. Nature does not write the laws by
which she guides herself! This is what dialectical materialism asserts. 

Finally, "Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and
their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the
semblance of independence." Ideas like "truth" and "law" are not
independent of real men in real material life-processes. When you
recognize that "truth" and "law" arise from the real activities of man in
society then you have historical materialism. When you believe these
ideas--e.g. the idea of truth--are independent of the social world, when
you posit the existence of natural law that stands transepochally and/or
suprasocietally, or is "discovered" by humans, then this is idealism. 

[Continued...]




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