Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 12:38:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: National Socialism and Truth


On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Ben B. Day wrote:

> On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Howard Hastings wrote:
> 
> > One is a "materialist" when one takes matter for the primary
> > reality.  That is still a very broad designation, which may include very
> > different philosophical tendencies and degrees of critical 
> > sophistication.   Materialists tend to see ideas as impermanent, changing,
> > dependent upon material conditions and so changing as these change.  They
> > tend to allow negation a constructive rather than simply destructive role
> > in thinking.
> 
> Well, this is not what is meant by Marx's "materialism." Marx's
> "materialism" is simply the primacy of economic relations, and these
> relations are no more material (in the sense of physical matter) than
> religious, state, or other cultural relations.

What accounts for the primacy of economic relations, then?

 The term comes from a
> popular misreading of Hegel that prevailed at the time (and which Marx was
> caught up in), which read him as what today we might call a "voluntarist."
> In other words, he was read as arguing that people propel history forward
> through their ideas and intentions. Today we know that Hegel's usage of
> terms like "Idea," "notion," "Geist [Mind or Spirit]," etc., led rather
> indepenent lives from the social actors caught up in them. The Weltgeist
> was the aggregation of cultureal and social relations, practices, etc.,
> which possessed a logic and immanent contradictions of its own which drove
> history.

I am not a Hegel expert, but this seems accurate to me. Except I would add
that the "voluntarist" reading remains with us today and arises for much
much the same reason that Marx gets read as an exponent of "economism."


  But Marx, not understanding this, constructed the
> idealist-materialist dichotomy along lines which today are closer to the
> debate over humanism (for and against).

I don't know why you would say Marx did not understand this. Seems to me
he understood it very well.  It also seems to me a major difference
between Hegel and Marx concerns the nature of social change, specifically
what they change is dependent upon, and what is dependent upon it.

 The idealist-materialist dichotomy which he
operates in his critique of Bauer, Feuerbach, and Stirner seems to me not
something imposed from without by him but simply a logical development
from within the left-Hegelian problematic in which all were working.  To
see these three thinkers as extending, reducing and exhausting
certain possibilities already potential in Hegel's work, and the young
Marx following these to the point where, after the dead end of Stirner's
"Ego,"  he is able to at once "invert" and preserve the dialectic-nothing
in that process suggest to me that Marx misread or oversimplified Hegel
along the lines you suggest, though this was certainly the case with other
lef Hegelians.

 And while carrying forward this critique, he seems well aware of the
difference between Hegel and his followers, at least in respect of
critical reflexivity. (Does he anywhere heap scorn on Hegel like that
heaped on the "heilige Max" at the end to the German Ideology?)

I assent to the general tendency of your description of Hegel as
misunderstood if one supposes his Weltgeist to be some kind of thinking
unitary being, like an evolving god or something.  I add that the
difference between reading summaries of philosophers and reading their
actual work is greater in the case of Hegel than anyone else I can think
of, and that it is mainly summaries of Hegel that give people the
impression you warn against (at least in the U.S.;in Germany, the
traditional culture in germany already predisposes many to read Hegel as
the historian of a transcendental essence). 

But it seems to me that even the young Marx distinguishes himself from
Stirner and Feuerbach precisely in that he, like Hegel, attends to a
massive amount of concrete, historical and cultural detail whose meaning
is embedded within, not without, that ensemble of relations you mention
above and the logic of their development--a logic in which development
generates and is generated in turn by conflict and contradiction.  In
Feuerbach and Stirner, the tendency is to move away from all that stuff to
ever simpler "essential" oppositions between Man and his projected other
or the indivdual and everything else.

The question to ask here is, then, where do Hegel and Marx primarily 
locate the causes of change,  recognizing that for neither is the answer
going to be simply material or ideal?  For Hegel, history is primarily the
history of Spirit, of consciousness. For Marx it is the history of 
of modes of economic production. This history conditons the history of
Spirit, even if the cause/effect relations implied by this are understood
in reciprocal and dialectical terms, rather than those of mechanical cause
and effect.

  Although Marx did - like most 19th
> century thinkers - model his methodology for uncovering social forces
> after the natural sciences, I'm not aware that he ever held the position
> that physical forces drove the economy. Indeed, economic relations were
> the object of analysis, and there was no Lockean move which would indicate
> that economic forces were driven by physical phenomena, but we'd simply
> have to "settle" for economic analyses until the physical sciences had
> advanced enough.

Here I am a little lost. My definition of materialism would be general
enough to include people who think that physical forces drive the economy
(however that would work) but it does not define materialists as those who
specifically believe that.  Also, I believe I specified that Marx was a
"historical materialist."  That would be someone who understood historical
and social change first of all in terms of changes in an economic mode of
production constituted by forces and relations of production.  A
historical materialist would also understand "conciousness" to be
interwoven with, rather than independent of, such relations, and effect as
well as a cause.

Marx modeled his methodlogy for uncovering social forces after the natural
sciences only sort of. Lots of people were already trying to do that
(e.g. Comte), and yet Marx's work is very distinct from theirs.  He was
still a dialectical thinker whose mature work does not simply adapt
experimental method to economics and history and sociology, but rather
establishes a new and critical standpoint from which those "sciences" can
themselves be understood as conditioned by economic development and
deployed in the service of class interest.  If Marx's work can be said to
have an epistemology, it is certianly one at odds with that of the
"normal" social science which dominates the U.S. academy in that it posits
a dialectical relation between knower and known, one in which both subject
and object of knowledge remain within history as products of economic,
historical, and political as well as of narrowly "scientific" social
processes.  Outside of the open recognition of the role that knowledge and
knowledge production plays in constituting and maintaining class control,
this latter point is probably the one that generates most conflict and
misunderstanding between marxists and representatives of
empiricist/positivist social science.


hh
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