marx eleventh thesis on feuerbach

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What did Marx mean by Thesis Eleven?

Posted by Mark Murphy | Aug 10, 2013 | Theory | 2

Thesis Eleven is the most famous of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach , and goes like this:

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

As well as being the most famous thesis it is also arguably the most misinterpreted of Marx’s statements generally, up there with ‘ Property is theft ’ (which was Marx quoting Proudhon , unfavourably). I sometimes get the impression that people who use the phrase have some variant of ‘act first, ask questions later (if at all)’ in their head when they use it. I may be wrong on that assumption (hard to tell), but this is certainly not the meaning intended by Marx when he went to work on Feuerbach and then later Max Stirner in The German Ideology . Instead Marx’s real target was the perceived need (then and now) to deliver some kind of objective philosophical justification/legitimation for engagement with acts of social struggle (against oppression, exploitation, colonialism etc).

An excellent explanation of Marx’s thinking around Thesis Eleven is provided by Cornel West in his book The ethical dimensions of Marxist thought (highly recommended). In the chapter ‘Marx’s adoption of radical historicism’, West argues that Thesis Eleven

was not a rejection of rational dialogue, discourse, or discussion, nor is it a call for blind activism (West, p. 68).

Rather, Thesis Eleven was a statement of Marx’s desire to situate philosophical thinking about social problems within history rather than outside it – Marx, not for the first time, flipping conventional wisdom on its head. Thesis Eleven itself was the inevitable outcome of a process begun earlier in the Theses, most notably in Theses Six & Seven, where Marx made clear his shift from philosophy to radical historicism, or what West refers to as the ‘move from philosophic aims and language to theoretic ones’:

This means that fundamental distinctions such as objectivism/relativism, necessary/arbitrary, or essential/accidental will no longer be viewed through a philosophic lens. That is, no longer will one be concerned with arriving at timeless criteria, necessary grounds, or universal foundations for philosophic objectivity, necessity, or essentiality. Instead, any talk about objectivity, necessity, or essentiality must be under-a-description, hence historically located, socially situated and “a product” of revisable, agreed-upon human conventions which reflect particular needs, social interests, and political powers at a specific moment in history. The task at hand then becomes a theoretic one, namely, providing a concrete social analysis which shows how these needs, interests, and powers shape and hold particular human conventions and in which ways these conventions can be transformed (West, p. 67).

For Marx, theorising social change went hand-in-hand with an understanding of social change as inevitably being ‘under-a-description’ as West puts it (great phrase). Thesis Eleven, then, is the culmination of this thinking, providing a succinct indication of the consequences of the radical historical shift for social struggle, a shift that assumes that

the heightened awareness of the limitations of traditional philosophy will soon render that philosophy barren, a mere blind and empty will-to-nothingness. In its place will thrive a theory of history and society, able to account for its own appearance and status, aware of the paradoxes it cannot solve, grounded in ever changing personal needs and social interests, and beckoning for action in order to overcome certain conditions and realize new conditions. In this way, the radical historicist viewpoint enables Marx to make the philosophic to theoretic shift without bothering his philosophic conscience (West, p. 68).

Marx then went on to have a right go at Max Stirner in The German Ideology (two-thirds of the book were devoted to Stirner’s The ego and its own , itself a partial critique of Marx). A radical historicist vs. a radical psychologist – they don’t make debates like that anymore, do they?

About The Author

Mark Murphy

Mark Murphy is a Reader in Education and Public Policy at the University of Glasgow. He previously worked as an academic at King’s College, London, University of Chester, University of Stirling, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, University College Dublin and Northern Illinois University. Mark is an active researcher in the fields of education and public policy. His research interests include educational sociology, critical theory, accountability in higher education, and public sector reform.

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Hi Mark, Is the phrase ‘under-a-description’ like an operational definition? Could you say a bit more about that and why you like it. Thanks

Marx said , masturbation is philosophical sex . But such an act doesn’t produce children , and you cannot philosophically grow carrots . I would argue Marx saw his world as theorizing , where as philosophers merely interpreted the actions of others , from what I’ve read of Marx he tired of philosophy not long after tiring of religion and spent his life working on political economy and other subjects .

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Theses On Feuerbach 1938 translation of Marx’s original

Source : MECW Volume 5, p. 3; Written : by Marx in Brussels in the spring of 1845, under the title “1) ad Feuerbach”; This version was first published in 1924 — in German and in Russian — by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow. First Published : the English translation was first published in the Lawrence and Wishart edition of The German Ideology in 1938.

1) ad Feuerbach [1] 1

The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [ Gegenstand ], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism — which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from conceptual objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In Das Wesen des Christenthums , he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance [2] . Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking , wants [ sensuous ] contemplation ; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical , human-sensuous activity.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man . But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment [ Gem�t ] by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated — human individual.

2. Essence, therefore, can be regarded only as “species”, as an inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals in a natural way .

Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

All social life is essentially practical . All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.

The standpoint of the old materialism is “civil” society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Deutsch | 1969 Selected Works translation | 2002 translation of Marx’s original | MECW translation of Engels’ 1888 version

Marx/Engels Works Archive | Study Guide | Engels on Feuerbach | Image of Thesis 11 | Works Index

Theses on Feuerbach

Originally written in 1845, these notes were not published until after Marx's death in 1888 by Engels.

The main deficiency, up to now, in all materialism – including that of Feuerbach – is that the external object, reality and sensibility are conceived only in the form of the object and of our contemplation of it, rather than as sensuous human activity and as practice – as something non-subjective. For this reason, the active aspect has been developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism, though only abstractly, since idealism naturally does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, clearly distinguished from mental objects, but he does not conceive human activity in terms of subject and object. That is why, in The Essence of Christianity , he regards only theoretical activity as authentically human, whilst practice is conceived and defined only in its dirty Jewish manifestation. He therefore does not understand the meaning of “revolutionary”, of practical-critical activity.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. Man must prove in practice the truth - i.e. the reality and power, the worldliness - of his thinking. Isolated from practice, the controversy over the reality or unreality of thinking is a purely scholastic question.

The materialist doctrine that humans are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, men who change are products of new circumstances and a different upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed by men themselves, and that it is essential to educate the educator. Necessarily, then, this doctrine divides society into two parts, one of which is placed above society (for example, in the work of Robert Owen).

The coincidence of changing circumstance on the one hand, and of human activity or self-changing on the other, can be conceived only as revolutionary practice, and rationally understood.

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation and the duplication of the world into an imagined religious world and a real world. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks that, once this work is completed, the central task remains to be done. But the fact that the secular basis detaches from itself and fixes in the clouds as an independent realm can be explained only by the self-negation and self-contradiction within it. This must be first of all understood in the context of its contradictions, and then be revolutionised by the removal of those contradictions. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then be theoretically critiqued and practically overthrown.

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensory intuition; but he does not conceive the realm of the senses in terms of practical, human sensuous activity.

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social conditions.

Feuerbach, who does not undertake a criticism of this real essence, is therefore compelled:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual;

2. For this reason, he can consider the human essence only as a “genus”, as an internal, mute generality which naturally unites the multiplicity of individuals.

Feuerbach therefore does not see that “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form.

Social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which turn theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the understanding of this practice.

The highest point reached by intuitive materialism - that is, materialism which does not comprehend the activity of the senses as practical activity - is the point-of-view of single individuals in “bourgeois society”.

The standpoint of the old materialism is “bourgeois” society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialised mankind.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways. What is crucial, however, is to change it.

This work is in the public domain worldwide because it has been so released by the copyright holder.

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Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)

Karl Marx is known as the father of communism. Written in 1845, his “Theses on Feuerbach” outlined the basic tendencies of his thought. A radical materialist, Marx wanted nothing to do with religious or philosophical forms of speculation. Both of these forms, he argued, were themselves determined by the material facts of social life. The essence of the human person as a thinking self, in fact, could only be understood in terms of one’s own social location and the economic relationships by which one was utterly dominated. Marx grounded his philosophy of historical change upon these ideas. Alterations in political history were due not to ideas, however derived, but to underlying forces at the base of society. He concluded these theses with his famous appeal for a new kind of philosophy, one that would not interpret human reality, but rather change it. Marx’s ideas influenced every area of modern German knowledge, from political and social thought to ethical reflection, cultural analysis, and university scholarship.

I The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity , he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence, he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary,” of “practical-critical,” activity.

II The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

III The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice .

IV Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

V Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.

VI Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: 1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract—isolated—human individual. 2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.

VII Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

VIII All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

IX The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.

X The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

XI The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Source of English translation: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1995, 1999, 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.0. Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Source of original German text: Karl Marx, “Thesen über Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke , vol. 3. Berlin: Dietz, 1962, pp. 5–7.

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Karl Marx. Thesen über Feuerbach. Theses on Feuerbach. German Text with a Facing Page English Translation. By Carlos Bendaña-Pedroza

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Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach

The theses on feuerbach and modern leftism..

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach are one of the most useful texts for understanding his philosophical and revolutionary methodology. This is due to its being concise whilst also demonstrating the methodological approach in action. The theses are a collection of eleven criticisms of prior philosophy up to Feuerbach, with Marx clearly positioning himself as being the herald of a new dawn in human development. He clearly wrote this at a key point in his intellectual development with it demonstrating the importance of his practical materialist focus. The world is not to be changed through philosophy, but through revolutionary action.

Ludwig A. Feuerbach (1804-1872)

Marx’s eleven Theses on Feuerbach:

First thesis:.

An intrinsic flaw in prior philosophic works is asserted, typically this follows the form of an inversion (we believe we are progressing but are in fact regressing, we thought that the answer was in developing more comprehensive ideas but these have led us further from the truth).

In the Hegelian tradition, particularly after its Marxist offshoot, this frequently appears as a criticism of objectivity. In other words, an object of knowledge such as an idea, is critiqued on the grounds of its lack of subjectivity. The aim being to overcome the objective by a rigorous development of the subjective.

Buried in here is an issue over the goal, the telos of thought and action. Where we are oriented toward ‘the wrong goal’ we work against ourselves and must adapt.

Since Marx’s materialism is initially directed against philosophy and religion it is easier to use them as examples. In the former, philosophers have sought to understand the world by creating objects of knowledge and abstractly manipulating them; in the latter, Christian theologians argue that God creates the world.

To Marx these are not only inadequate, they are false and inherently harmful. Philosophy and theology are both set as placing an erroneous value on abstraction to the poverty of the physical, they reject “revolutionary … practical-critical activity.”  [1]

Part of Marx’s correction is to ensure that people alter their perception to see the world “as practice”. The person taking part in simple “human activity … objective activity” must make a qualitative transformation and instead perform “ sensuous human activity ”.

Second thesis:

Truth is then detached from those prior systems. For example, truth cannot be apprehended through philosophy or theology, instead truth must be apprehended through the practical. It is down to those holding the ideas to demonstrate their “truth”. It is quite clear that “power” is a core principle. Whether the ideas manifested into action are a success or not are the gauge of their power, their truth. It is only through the vehicle of physical practice that whether something is “real” or not can be demonstrated.

Third thesis:

The progression requires that people themselves are changed. The need is for academics to be instructed, who then teach progressively more students and yet-to-be teachers. It is through academia that revolutionary praxis (theory into action, which generates new theory and is converted into new action, ad nauseum) is established.

Earlier in the Theses on Feuerbach the criticism is levelled against a certain discipline and the knowledge being abstract, whereas here, Marx critiques society itself. Much like how he accuses established knowledge of being oriented towards false truths, society can also be false. The task is to break apart the processes which sustain the existing society and a key part of this is to establish at first in theory, a more ideal form of society. Revolutionary action is putting into effect this theory, it is the action and implementing it which demonstrates its truth. However, this change can only occur through revolutionary action, incidentally, sensuous human activity .

Note: a number of years prior to the Theses on Feuerbach Marx had made clear that this division of society into present and desired, was likewise bifurcated with emotion. He is quite clear that all evil must be concentrated onto existing society whilst at the same time all good is instrumentally located with the Revolutionary Society  [2, pp. 137-142] . Revolutionaries need not feel guilt or have any qualms about overthrowing the old society, whilst at the same time they possess certainty of their own moral status.

Fourth thesis:

In this thesis Marx critiques Feuerbach, who had argued that God is a psychological projection out of our consciousness. Feuerbach after his negative critique had then sought a positive one in which divinity became relocated in the collective: “ man with man … that is God” [3, p. §60] and that discovery “takes the place of religion” [3, p. §64] . Marx having a strict materialist position rejects Feuerbach’s philosophy becoming the basis of a new religion, since he sees it as maintaining the old issue by an alternative means. So, Marx set the two as being mutually exclusive, the theoretical destroys the materialistic and so the higher-society cannot be brought into existence. Instead, the future ought to be practical.

Fifth thesis:

Marx accuses Feuerbach of failing to grasp the importance of revolutionary action and that he commits a fundamental error. Note: how V parallels I.

Sixth thesis:

The critique now shifts to reform Feuerbach’s ideas. Marx argues that Feuerbach succeeds in realising that the true essence of religion is not God but is in humanity . However, this cannot merely be left as an abstraction, it must of course be made into practical reality by revolutionary practice which establishes the idea in existence and reveals the power of the idea and action, hence the truth of the matter. In order to make Feuerbach’s collective-human god more than an idea, Marx invests the system of social relations with this divinity. This is summarised as:

• A) Feuerbach re-establishes a contradiction between abstract idea of human divinity and the practical manifestation of human divinity.
• B) This reduces human divinity to the province of being a simple analytical category.

Seventh thesis:

The accusation is that Feuerbach failed to follow the line of reasoning to completion and so, Feuerbach misses Marx’s addition which is that: depending on the type of people you have you get different manifestations of religion. Different societies have different religions and to tie this in with the 3 rd thesis, a higher society will have a higher religious manifestation which can be taught through academia.

Eighth thesis:

It is the physical world which is the essence of social existence and the relations therein. The means of resolving the problem of re-occurring abstraction is to implement revolutionary practice and to establish new theories based on this practice.

Ninth thesis:

Prior philosophic materialism, such as that of Feuerbach, does not yet move the world into a place of non-contradiction between people and the ideas that they hold. Nor does it then overcome civil society with a human society at the level of the species.

Tenth thesis:

The purpose of prior materialism is the erroneous goal of “civil society”, whereas Marx’s materialism is a qualitative change into a new form of society, viz-á-viz I-III, and which realises VI-VIII.

Eleventh thesis:

Philosophers once “interpreted” the world, now their duty is to reform it.

Theses on Feuerbach: Discussion

The Theses on Feuerbach clearly have a number of significant implications.

Marx sets out to establish an entirely new conception of reality and whilst in his view philosophy had utility in the past, it is to be replaced by revolutionary action. Other conceptions of existence, knowledge and ethics are treated as simplistic whereas his materialist conception is positioned as the highest. Truth is dependent on action, not on philosophy, so that ‘truth’ is only what occurs through the materialist worldview. This form of truth is recognised to be subjective, but it is taken as proven when the materialist worldview comes to exert power over existence.

The aim is to undo the distinction between abstract and materialist through revolutionary action.

The above are inculcated through education, be it academic or journalistic. People are taught that on the one hand there are simplistic abstract conceptions of existence, secondly, that there is a higher alternative. This higher alternative is realised (made into a physical reality) through revolutionary action.

Readers might note in the above the mechanistic model of historicism , that history has a purpose and is marching towards it. In Marx’s system he, like Hegel before him, subjectively decides on what that future state of existence ought to look like.

This is important because it establishes an academic monopoly over the ability to determine the pathway of human development. Hegelian academia is inquisitive insofar as they can take their ideas and turn them into directives which others must deliver. In other words, academicians develop complex theories which restrict people into being extensions of the Hegelian academic. The natural consequence of this is that there is a bifurcation in academia, society, culture which is aiming to reform reality. Under Marxian education this means that only certain educators and certain disciplines are considered to have legitimate knowledge or some semblance of the truth. The truth/legitimacy of the discipline or its teaching, stems from the materialist conception of existence and revolutionary action oriented to the subjectively selected historicist goal. The methodology by which knowledge is developed and what is considered to be knowledge, are made the sole province of Hegelian academics (naturally different offshoots will disagree on their version of the truth).

Pre-figured into this is the fact that you as an individual exist for a purpose, and that purpose is to establish this academically hypothesised reformation of existence and the superordinate society that needs to be brought into being.

This new academic process is also religious. Feuerbach argues that God was an idea, a psychological projection which we create, for him this means that God originates in the human. Marx describes how he lost belief in God and decided that “new gods had to be installed”  [4, p. 18] . He states that he he arrived at Hegel’s process but with one additional step, which is that it had to be materialised through revolutionary action. In other words, like in Hegel’s philosophy god is constituted by humanity, but like Feuerbach god is in the collective; Marx materialises these two conceptions so that the Marxist collective embody divinity in their union with the material world, in the union of humanity with nature .

The Marxian form of academia indoctrinates students with the idea that history marches toward a known-end. It is the duty of all who receive the Promethean light of the revolutionary methodology from the Marxian academics, to herald and then usher in this future in which the revolutionary collective undergoes a collective apotheosis and becomes divine (“man is the supreme being for man”  [2, pp. 137, 142 see also 131] ). Under Marx’s materialist reformation of reality, theology is replaced by social science and the academy becomes a neo-seminary. It is in the neo-seminary that the correct action, knowledge and truths are conveyed to adepts.

Science is here a method for developing peoples’ consciousness toward the end-goal of Marx’s system; the person who undergoes the scientific process is moved from being crude and simple, to being superior. Their duty then becomes the manifestation of the higher reality and its corresponding ‘ human society’. With Hegelian science , the form of religious consciousness and all reality is likewise transformed.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach are incredibly useful for understanding the thought which governs Marxist philosophy, revolutionary practice and the later philosophical modifications of Marx’s philosophy and praxis . Within the theses we can see the very movement of the dialectic in action through the critique of Feuerbach. The critique reveals contradictions which must be dialectically brought into harmony and thus create a synthesis. Whilst past syntheses have taken place through abstraction in philosophy, the primary synthesis established by Marx is through materialism. This requires the negation of past abstractions and to then replace philosophical labour with practical labour, that practical labour being the positive movement of ideas which are based on material reality. The task of the materialist collective being to take the abstract Hegelian form of divinity (the philsophic-god of the Absolute Idea) and materialise it, manifesting the divine dialectical collective which restlessly self-creates and reforms its consciousness.

The requirement for revolutionary action does not simply upend society and the political landscape, but reforms existence in its entirety. Through a sequence of historicist steps, the person is dialectically led to a reformed conceptualisation of existence, a new means of developing knowledge and socially constructing ‘truth’, with a corresponding system of ethics and sense of beauty, complete with a new subject-object to worship: humanity-nature . It demands nothing less than a revolution from reality itself.

A number of quotes by Marxian intellectuals on the religious aspects of Marxist socialis are available in my book The Revolutionary Renaissance , some of which can be seen here .

Works Cited

@DialecticWizard

TheHoneybarrel

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Living the Eleventh Thesis

—Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach , No. 11

When I was a boy I always assumed that I would grow up to be both a scientist and a Red. Rather than face a problem of combining activism and scholarship, I would have had a very difficult time trying to separate them.

Before I could read, my grandfather read to me from Bad Bishop Brown’s Science and History for Girls and Boys . 1 My grandfather believed that at a minimum every socialist worker should be familiar with cosmology, evolution, and history. I never separated history, in which we are active participants, from science, the finding out how things are. My family had broken with organized religion five generations back, but my father sat me down for Bible study every Friday evening because it was an important part of the surrounding culture and important to many people, a fascinating account of how ideas develop in changing conditions, and because every atheist should know it as well as believers do.

On my first day of primary school, my grandmother urged me to learn everything they could teach me—but not to believe it all. She was all too aware of the “racial science” of 1930s Germany and the justifications for eugenics and male supremacy that were popular in our own country. Her attitude came from her knowledge of the uses of science for power and profit and from a worker’s generic distrust of the rulers. Her advice formed my stance in academic life: consciously in, but not of, the university. I grew up in a left-wing neighborhood of Brooklyn where the schools were empty on May Day and where I met my first Republican at age twelve. Issues of science, politics, and culture were debated in permanent clusters on the Brighton Beach boardwalk and were the bread and butter of mealtime conversation. Political commitment was assumed, how to act on that commitment was a matter of fierce debate.

As a teenager I became interested in genetics through my fascination with the work of the Soviet scientist Lysenko. He turned out to be dreadfully wrong, especially in trying to reach biological conclusions from philosophical principles. However, his criticism of the genetics of his time turned me toward the work of Waddington and Schmalhausen and others who would not simply dismiss him out of hand in Cold War fashion but had to respond to his challenge by developing a deeper view of the organism–environment interaction.

My wife, Rosario Morales, introduced me to Puerto Rico in 1951, and my eleven years there gave a Latin American perspective to my politics. The various left-wing victories in South America were a source of optimism even in those grim times. FBI surveillance in Puerto Rico blocked me from the jobs I was looking for and I ended up doing vegetable farming for a living on the island’s western mountains.

As an undergraduate at Cornell University’s School of Agriculture, I had been taught that the prime agricultural problem of the United States was the disposal of the farm surplus. But as a farmer in a poor region of Puerto Rico, I saw the significance of agriculture for people’s lives. That experience introduced me to the realities of poverty as it undermines health, shortens lives, closes options, and stultifies personal growth, and to the specific forms that sexism takes among the rural poor. Direct labor organizing on the coffee plantations was combined with study. Rosario and I wrote the agrarian program of the Puerto Rican Communist Party in which we combined rather amateurish economic and social analysis with some firsthand insights into ecological production methods, diversification, conservation, and cooperatives.

I first went to Cuba in 1964 to help develop their population genetics and get a look at the Cuban Revolution. Over the years I became involved in the ongoing Cuban struggle for ecological agriculture and an ecological pathway of economic development that was just, egalitarian, and sustainable. Progressivist thinking, so powerful in the socialist tradition, expected that developing countries had to catch up with advanced countries along the single pathway of modernization. It dismissed critics of the high-tech pathway of industrial agriculture as “idealists,” urban sentimentalists nostalgic for a bucolic rural golden age that never really existed. But there was another view, that each society creates its own ways of relating to the rest of nature, its own pattern of land use, its own appropriate technology, and its own criteria of efficiency. This discussion raged in Cuba in the 1970s and by the 1980s the ecological model had basically won although implementation was still a long process. The Special Period, that time of economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the materials for high-tech became unavailable, allowed ecologists by conviction to recruit the ecologists by necessity. This was possible only because the ecologists by conviction had prepared the way.

I first met dialectical materialism in my early teens through the writings of the British Marxist scientists J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, and others, and then on to Marx and Engels. It immediately grabbed me both intellectually and aesthetically. A dialectical view of nature and society has been a major theme of my research since. I have delighted in the dialectical emphasis on wholeness, connection and context, change, historicity, contradiction, irregularity, asymmetry, and the multiplicity of levels of phenomena, a refreshing counterweight to the prevalent reductionism then and now.

An example: after Rosario suggested I look at Drosophila in nature—not just in bottles in the laboratory—I started to work with the Drosophila in the neighborhood of our home in Puerto Rico. My question was: How do Drosophila species cope with the temporal and spatial gradients of their environments? I began examining the multiple ways that different Drosophila species responded to similar environmental challenges. I could collect Drosophila in a single day in the deserts of Gúanica and in the rain forest around our farm at the crest of the cordillera. It turned out that some species adapt physiologically to high temperature in two to three days, and show relatively little genetic differences in heat tolerance along a 3,000-foot altitude gradient (about twenty miles). Others had distinct genetic sub-populations in the different habitats. Still others adapted to and inhabited only a part of the available environmental range.

One of the desert species was not any better at tolerating heat than some Drosophila from the rain forest, but were much better at finding the cool moist microsites and hiding in them after about 8 a.m. These findings led me to describe the concepts of co-gradient selection, where the direct impact of the environment enhances genetic differences among populations, and counter-gradient selection where genetic differences offset the direct impact of the environment. Since on my transect the high temperature was associated with dry conditions, natural selection acted to increase the size of the flies at Guánica while the effect of temperature on development made them smaller. The outcome turned out to be that the flies from the sea-level desert and the rain forest were of about the same size in their own habitats, but that Guánica flies were bigger when raised at the same temperature as rain forest flies.

In this work I questioned the prevailing reductionist bias in biology by insisting that phenomena take place on different levels, each with their own laws, but also connected. My bias was dialectical: the interaction among adaptations on the physiological, behavioral, and genetic levels. My preference for process, variability, and change set the agenda for my thesis.

The problem was how species can adapt to an environment when the environment was not always the same. When I began thesis work I was puzzled by the facile assumption that, faced with opposing demands, for example when the environment favors small size some of the time and large size the rest of the time, an organism would have to adopt some intermediate state as a compromise. But this is an unthinking application of the liberal bromide that when there are opposing views the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In my dissertation, the study of fitness sets was an attempt to examine when an intermediate position is truly an optimum and when is it the worst possible choice. The short answer turned out to be that when the alternatives are not too different, an intermediate position is indeed optimal, but when they are very different compared to the range of tolerance of the species, then one extreme alone or in some cases a mixture of extremes is preferable.

Work in natural selection within population genetics almost always assumed a constant environment, but I was interested in its inconstancy. I proposed that “environmental variation” must be an answer to many questions of evolutionary ecology and that organisms adapt not only to specific environmental features such as high temperature or alkaline soils but also to the pattern of the environment—its variability, its uncertainty, the grain of its patchiness, the correlations among different aspects of the environment. Moreover, these patterns of environment are not simply given, external to the organism: organisms select, transform, and define their own environments.

Regardless of the particular matter of an investigation (evolutionary ecology, agriculture, or more recently, public health), my core interest has always been the understanding of the dynamics of complex systems. Also, my political commitment requires that I question the relevance of my work. In one of Brecht’s poems he says, “Truly we live in a terrible time…when to talk about trees is almost a crime because it is a kind of silence about injustice.” Brecht was of course wrong about trees: nowadays when we talk of trees we are not ignoring injustice. But he was also right that scholarship that is indifferent to human suffering is immoral.

Poverty and oppression cost years of life and health, shrinks the horizons, and cuts off potential talents before they can flourish. My commitment to support the struggles of the poor and oppressed and my interest in variability combined to focus my attention on the physiological and social vulnerabilities of people.

I have been studying the body’s capacity to restore itself after it is stressed by malnutrition, pollution, insecurity, and inadequate health care. Continual stress undermines the stabilizing mechanisms in the bodies of oppressed populations making them more vulnerable to anything that happens, to small differences in their environments. This shows up in increased variability in measures of blood pressure, body mass index, and life expectancy as compared to more uniform results in comfortable populations. In examining the effects of poverty, it is not enough to examine the prevalence of separate diseases in different populations. Whereas specific pathogens or pollutants may precipitate specific named diseases, social conditions create more diffuse vulnerability that links medically unrelated diseases. For instance, malnutrition, infection, or pollution can breach the protective barriers of the intestine. But once breached for any of these reasons it becomes a locus of invasion by pollutants, microbes, or allergens. Therefore nutritional problems, infectious diseases, stress, and toxicities cause a great variety of seemingly unrelated diseases.

The prevailing notion since the 1960s had been that infectious disease would disappear with economic development. In the 1990s I helped form the Harvard Group on New and Resurgent Disease to reject that idea. Our argument was partly ecological: the rapid adaptation of vectors to changing habitats—to deforestation, irrigation projects, and population displacement by war and famine. We also focused on the equally rapid adaptation of pathogens to pesticides and antibiotics. But we also criticized the physical, institutional, and intellectual isolation of medical research from plant pathology and veterinary studies which could have shown sooner the broad pattern of upsurge of not only malaria, cholera, and AIDS, but also African swine fever, feline leukemia, tristeza disease of citrus, and bean golden mosaic virus. We have to expect epidemiological changes with growing economic disparities and with changes in land use, economic development, human settlement, and demography. The faith in the efficacy of antibiotics, vaccines, and pesticides against plant, animal, and human pathogens is naïve in the light of adaptive evolution. And the developmentalist expectation that economic growth will lead the rest of the world to affluence and to the elimination of infectious disease is being proved wrong.

The resurgence of infectious disease is but one manifestation of a more general crisis: the eco-social distress syndrome—the pervasive multilevel crisis of dysfunctional relations within our species and between it and the rest of nature. It includes in one network of actions and reactions patterns of disease, relations of production and reproduction, demography, our depletion and wanton destruction of natural resources, changing land use and settlement, and planetary climate change. It is more profound than previous crises, reaching higher into the atmosphere, deeper into the earth, more widespread in space, and more long lasting, penetrating more corners of our lives. It is both a generic crisis of the human species and a specific crisis of world capitalism. Therefore it is a primary concern of both my science and my politics.

The complexity of this whole world syndrome can be overwhelming, and yet to evade the complexity by taking the system apart to treat the problems one at a time can produce disasters. The great failings of scientific technology have come from posing problems in too small a way. Agricultural scientists who proposed the Green Revolution without taking pest evolution and insect ecology into account, and therefore expecting pesticides would control pests, have been surprised that pest problems increased with spraying. Similarly, antibiotics create new pathogens, economic development creates hunger, and flood control promotes floods. Problems have to be solved in their rich complexity; the study of complexity itself becomes an urgent practical as well as theoretical problem.

These interests inform my political work: within the left, my task has been to argue that our relations with the rest of nature cannot be separated from a global struggle for human liberation, and within the ecology movement my task has been to challenge the “harmony of nature” idealism of early environmentalism and to insist on identifying the social relations that lead to the present dysfunction. At the same time my politics have determined my scientific ethics. I believe that all theories are wrong that promote, justify, or tolerate injustice.

A leftist critique of the structure of intellectual life is a counterweight to the culture of the universities and foundations. The antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s took up the issues of the nature of the university as an organ of class rule and made the intellectual community itself an object of theoretical as well as practical interest. I joined Science for the People, an organization that started with a research strike at MIT in 1967 as a protest against military research on campus. As a member I helped in the challenge to the Green Revolution and genetic determinism. Antiwar activism also took me to Vietnam to investigate war crimes (especially the use of defoliants) and from there to organizing Science for Vietnam. We denounced the use of Agent Orange (used as defoliant in the Vietnamese jungle) that was causing birth defects among Vietnamese peasants. Agent Orange was one of the worst uses of chemical herbicides.

The Puerto Rican independence movement gave me an anti-imperialist consciousness that serves me well in a university that promotes “structural reform” and other euphemisms for empire. My wife’s sharp working-class feminism is a running source of criticism of the pervasive elitism and sexism. Regular work with Cuba shows me vividly that there is an alternative to a competitive, individualistic, exploitative society.

Community organizations, especially in marginalized communities, and the women’s health movement raise issues that academia prefers to ignore: the mothers of Woburn noticing that too many of their children from the same small neighborhood had leukemia, the hundreds of environmental justice groups that noted that toxic waste dumps were concentrated in black and Latino neighborhoods, and the Women’s Community Cancer project and others who insist on the environmental causes of cancer and other diseases while the university laboratories are looking for guilty genes. Their initiatives help me maintain an alternative agenda for both theory and action.

Within the university I have a contradictory relationship with the institution and with colleagues, a combination of cooperation and conflict. We may share a concern about health disparities and persistent poverty, but we are in conflict about corporations funding research for patentable molecules and about government agencies such as USAID (Agency for International Development) promoting the goals of empire. 2

I never aspired to what is conventionally considered a “successful career” in academia. I do not find most of my personal validation through the formal reward and recognition system of the scientific community, and I try not to share the common assumptions of my professional community. This gives me wide freedom of choice. Thus when I declined to join the National Academy of Sciences and received many supportive letters praising my courage or calling it a difficult decision, I could honestly say that it was not a hard decision, merely a political choice taken collectively by the Science for the People group in Chicago. We judged that it was more useful to take a public stand against the Academy’s collaboration with the Vietnam-American War than to join the Academy and attempt to influence its actions from inside. Dick Lewontin had already tried that unsuccessfully and resigned, along with Bruce Wallace.

I have always enjoyed mathematics and see one of its tasks as making the obscure obvious. I regularly employ a sort of mid-level math in unconventional ways to promote understanding more than prediction. Much modeling now aims at precise equations giving precise prediction. This makes sense in engineering. In the field of policy, it makes sense to those who are the advisors to the rulers who imagine they have complete enough control of the world to be able to optimize their efforts and investments of resources. But those of us who are in the opposition have no such illusion. The best we can do is decide where to push the system. For this, a qualitative mathematics is more useful. My work with signed digraphs (loop analysis) is one such approach. Rejecting the opposition between qualitative and quantitative analysis and the notion that quantitative is superior to qualitative, I have mostly worked with those mathematical tools that assist conceptualization of complex phenomena.

Political activism, of course, attracts the attention of the agencies of repression. I have been fortunate in that regard, having experienced only relatively light repression. Others did not fare as well, with lost careers, years of imprisonment, violent attacks, intense harassment even of their families, and deportations. Some, mostly from the Puerto Rican, African-American, and Native American liberation movements, as well as the five Cuban anti-terrorists arrested in Florida, are still political prisoners.

Exploitation kills and hurts people. Racism and sexism destroy health and thwart lives. Studying the greed and brutality and smugness of late capitalism is painful and infuriating. Sometimes I have to recite from Jonathan Swift:

For the most part scholarship and activism have given me an enjoyable and rewarding life, doing work I find intellectually exciting, socially useful, and with people I love.

• ↩ John Montgomery Brown had been a Lutheran Episcopal bishop of the Missouri Synod, excommunicated when he became a Marxist. In the 1930s he published the quarterly journal Heresy .
• ↩ USAID supports health and development in strategically chosen third-world countries. Its separate programs are sometimes helpful and participants are motivated by humanitarian concerns. But the agency is also a terrorist organization, supporting counter-revolutionary groups in Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba. It once supported LEAP (Law Enforcement Assistance Program) that taught torture to Uruguayan and Brazilian police.

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Commentary on “Theses on Feuerbach” from “The Principle of Hope,” by Ernst Bloch

Significant brevity is coherent, that is why it is the least quick to put itself into words. Thus the understanding must repeatedly prove itself anew in such propositions. This nowhere more freshly than in the terse collection of the most terse directions which are known as the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach. Marx wrote them down in April 1845 in Brussels, most probably in the burst of preparatory work for ‘The German Ideology’. The theses were not published until 1888 by Engels, as an appendix to his ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy’. Here Engels slightly edited Marx’s occasionally sketchy text for style, naturally without the slightest change of content. Concerning the theses, Engels writes in the foreword to his ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’: ‘They are notes for later elaboration, jotted down quickly, definitely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which the seed of genius of the new view of the world is set down.’ Feuerbach had recalled us from pure thought to sensory perception, from mind to man, together with nature as his basis. As we know, this both ‘humanistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ rejection of Hegel (with man as the main idea, nature rather than mind as primary) had a strong influence on the young Marx.

Feuerbach’s ‘The Essence of Christianity’, 1841, his ‘Provisional Theses for a Reform of Philosophy’, 1842, and even his ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’, 1843, seemed all the more liberating since even the left-wing school of Hegelians could not detach itself from Hegel, in fact did not go beyond a merely internal Hegelian critique of the master of idealism. ‘The enthusiasm’, says Engels in ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, looking back at it around fifty years later, ‘was general: we were all momentarily Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new interpretation, and how greatly – despite all critical reservations – he was influenced by it, we can read in ‘The Holy Family’ (Ludwig Feuerbach, Dietz, 1946, p. 14). The German youth of that time believed it could at last see land instead of heaven, human, of this world.

Meanwhile Marx very soon detached himself from this all too vague humanness of this world. His activity on the ‘Rheinische Zeitung’ had brought him into far closer contact with political and economic questions than the left-wing Hegelians, or even the Feuerbachians enjoyed. This very contact increasingly led Marx from the critique of religion, to which Feuerbach restricted himself, to the critique of the state, indeed already of the social organization which – as the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of State’, 1841 – 3, recognizes – determines the form of the state. In Hegel’s distinction between bourgeois society and state, emphasized by Marx, more economic consciousness was in fact already concealed than in his epigones, even in the Feuerbachians. The separation from Feuerbach occurred with respect and in the first place as a correction or even as a mere amendment, but the totally different, social viewpoint is clear from the beginning. On 13th March 1843 Marx thus writes to Ruge:

‘For me Feuerbach’s aphorisms are only incorrect on one point, he refers too much to nature and too little to politics. This is however the only alliance through which current philosophy can become truth’ (MEGA I, 1/2, p. 308). The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, 1844, contain another significant celebration of Feuerbach, admittedly as a contrast to the woolgathering of Bruno Bauer; they praise above all among Feuerbach’s achievements the ‘foundation of true materialism and of real science, in that Feuerbach likewise makes the relationship between ‘'man and man” into the fundamental principle of his theory’ (MEGA I, 3, P. 152). But the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ are already a lot further beyond Feuerbach than they declare. The relationship between ‘man and man’ in them does not remain an abstract anthropological one at all, as it does in Feuerbach, instead the critique of human self-alienation (transferred from religion to the state) already penetrates to the economic heart of the alienation process. This not least in the splendid passages on Hegelian phenomenology, in which the historically formative role of work is identified, and Hegel’s work interpreted in the light of it. At the same time, however, the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ criticize this work because it interprets human work-activity only as mental, not as material. The breakthrough to political economy, i.e. away from Feuerbach’s general idea of man, is accomplished in the first work undertaken in collaboration with Engels, in ‘The Holy Family’, likewise in 1844. The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ already contained the sentence: ‘Workers themselves are capital, a commodity (1.c., p. 103), whereby nothing more of Feuerbachian humanness remains here than its negation in capitalism; ‘The Holy Family’ noted capitalism itself as the source of this strongest and final alienation.

Instead of Feuerbachian generic man, with his abstract naturalness which always remains the same, a historically changing ensemble of social relationships now clearly appeared and above all: one that is antagonistic in class terms. Alienation, of course, embraced both: the exploiting class as well as that of the exploited, above all in capitalism, the strongest form of this relinquishing of self, false objectification of self. ‘But’, states ‘The Holy Family’, ‘the first class feels happy and confirmed in this self-alienation, knows that the alienation is its own power and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence; the second class feels itself destroyed in alienation, perceives in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence’ (MEGA I, 3, P. 206). Which in fact showed the respective class-based methods of production and exchange based on the division of labour, particularly the capitalist ones, to be the finally discovered source of alienation. Marx was a materialist at the latest from 1843 onwards; ‘The Holy Family’ gave birth to the materialist interpretation of history in 1844, and with it scientific socialism. And the ‘Eleven Theses’, produced between ‘The Holy Family’ of 1844/45 and ‘The German Ideology’ of 1845/46 , thus represent the formulated departure from Feuerbach, together with a highly original entry into a new original inheritance. Politically empirical experience from the Rhineland period plus Feuerbach made Marx immune to the ‘mind’ and nothing but ‘mind’ of the left-wing school of Hegelians. The adopted standpoint of the proletariat allowed Marx to become causally and concretely, that is, truly (fundamentally) humanistic.

As is self-evident, the departure here is not a complete break. References to Feuerbach run through large parts of Marx’s work, even after the departure of the ‘Eleven Theses’. Closest to the abandoned land, if only for chronological reasons, stands ‘The German Ideology’ which directly followed the theses. Many critical approaches of the theses return in it, although of course the critique of Feuerbach and the murderous demolition of second-rate Hegelian epigones are vastly different here. Feuerbach still belonged to bourgeois ideology, so the analysis of its pseudo-radical manifestations of decay, such as Bruno Bauer and Stirner [Max Stirner, 1806 – 56, nom de plume of the German individualist philosopher Johann Kaspar], also had to implicate him in ‘The German Ideology’. But in such a way that in places the philosopher himself supplied the handle of the logical weapon with which Marx also intervened against him, but above all against the left-wing Hegelians. Consequently, ‘The German Ideology’ fundamentally begins with the name of Feuerbach and criticizes, starting out from his critique of religion, the simply inner idealistic ‘conquering’ of idealism. ‘It has not occurred to any of these philosophers to inquire about the connections of German philosophy with German reality, about the connections of their critique with their own material surroundings’ (MEGA I, 5, P. 10). However, Marx stresses on the other hand that Feuerbach ‘is to be greatly preferred to the “pure” materialists in that he realizes that man is also a “sensory object"’. In fact, the recognition cited above indicates the importance of Feuerbach for the early development of Marxism just as much as the critique of his abstract, ahistorical notion of the human being indicates the un- and indeed anti-Feuerbachian character of fully developed Marxism itself. The recognition states: without man equally being a ‘sensory object’, it would have been much more difficult to have worked out human activity materialistically as the root of all social things. Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism thus marks the facilitated possible transition from mere mechanical to historical materialism. The critique states: without the concretization of what is human into really existing, and above all socially active men, with real relationships to one another and to nature, materialism and history would have in fact continually fallen apart, despite all ‘anthropology’. In this connection, however, Feuerbach always remains important for Marx, both as a transit point and as the only contemporary philosopher of whom an analysis is at all possible, clarifying and fruitful. The basic thoughts to which Marx critically reacts in this way, and via which he makes productive progress, are essentially contained in Feuerbach’s central work ‘The Essence of Christianity’ of 1841. Feuerbach’s ‘Provisional Theses for a Reform of Philosophy’ of 1842 and the ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’ of 1843 also come into consideration. The earlier writings of the philosopher can hardly have been of any importance for Marx, since Feuerbach, at least until 1839, was too unoriginal, and lay too much under the influence of Hegel. Only from that time on did Feuerbach apply the Hegelian concept of self-alienation to religion. Only from that time on did the earlier Hegelian say his first thought had been God, his second reason, and his third and last was man. This means: just as the Hegelian philosophy of reason had overcome church-belief, so philosophy now put man (with the inclusion of nature as his basis) in place of Hegel. Despite all this, however, Feuerbach could not find the path to reality; precisely the most important aspect of Hegel: the historical-dialectical method, he rejected. It was only the ‘Eleven Theses’ that became signposts out of mere anti-Hegelianism into reality which can be changed, out of the materialism of the base behind the lines into that of the Front.

Question of Grouping

How the theses should be ordered is both an old and a new question. For the way they stand, for private reference, not intended for publication, they repeatedly overlap. They also present the same content in another place, do not always make the reason for their division and sequence evident. The requirements of teaching have thus occasioned various attempts to rearrange the theses as they belong together and hence to divide them into groups. In doing this, the attempt is sometimes made to let the sequence of numbers stand, just as if the ‘Eleven Theses’ could be subsumed one after the other, in a direct row. For example, such a grouping which sticks to the numbers looks as follows: Theses 1, 2, 3 are under the heading: Unity of Theory and Practice in Thought, Theses 4 and 5 under: Understanding of Reality in Contradictions, Theses 6, 7, 8, 9 under: Reality itself in Contradictions, Theses 10, 11 under: Location and Task of Dialectical Materialism in Society. This is the arrangement according to figures ; since there are several other such arrangements quite different in terms of content, it shows how little instructive the mere place value of the numbers is here. Each of these arrangements treats the order in too exalted a fashion on the one hand, in that they allow it to remain eternally entrenched, as in the Twelve Table Law or in the Ten Commandments, while on the other hand they treat it in too lowly and formalistic a fashion, as if it was a series of stamps. But numbering is not systematics, and Marx needs this substitute least of all. Hence the theses must be grouped philosophically, not arithmetically, that is, the order of the theses is solely that of their themes and contents . There is, as far as can be seen, still no commentary on the Eleven Theses; only when there is one, arising out of the common cause itself, does the continuously productive coherence of their brevity and depth also open up. Then there appears: firstly, the epistemological group dealing with perception and activity (Theses 5, 1, 3); secondly, the anthropological-historical group dealing with self-alienation, its real cause and true materialism (Theses 4, 6, 7, 9, 10); thirdly, the uniting or theory-practice group, dealing with proof and probation (Theses 2, 8). Finally there follows the most important thesis, the password that not only marks a final parting of the minds, but with whose use they cease to be nothing but minds (Thesis 11). Strictly speaking, the epistemological group is opened by Thesis 5, the anthropological-historical group by Thesis 4; since these theses describe the two basic theories of Feuerbach which Marx relatively accepts, and which he goes on beyond in the remaining theses of the respective groups. The basic theory adopted is the rejection of abstract thinking in Thesis 5, the rejection of human self-alienation in Thesis 4. And corresponding to the first basic feature of materialist dialectics, the depiction of which announces itself here, between the individual theses within each respective group there is free, complementary movement of voices; just as, between the groups themselves, continual correlation is taking place, forming a coherent unified whole.

Epistemological Group: Perception and Activity Theses 5, 1, 3

It is recognized here that even when thinking we can only proceed from the sensory. Perception, not the concept which is merely taken from it, is and remains the beginning where all materialist cognition identifies itself. Feuerbach reminded us of this at a time when every academic street-corner still resounded with mind, concept and nothing but concept. Thesis 5 stresses this contribution: Feuerbach is ‘not content’ with cerebrality, he wants his feet on the perceived ground. But Thesis 5, and then above all Thesis 1, both make clear that with contemplative sensoriness, the only kind Feuerbach understands, his feet cannot yet move and the ground itself remains unnegotiable. The person who perceives in this way does not even try to move, he remains standing in a state of comfortable enjoyment. Hence Thesis 5 teaches: mere perceiving ‘does not understand sensoriness as practical, as human-sensory activity’. And Thesis 1 reproaches the whole of previous materialism for only understanding perception ‘under the form of the object’, ‘not however as human, sensory activity, practice, not subjectively’. Hence it happened that the active side, in contrast to materialism, ‘was developed from idealism – but only abstractly, since idealism obviously does not know real sensory activity as such’. The inactive perception in which all previous materialism persists, including that of Feuerbach, is thus replaced by the human activity factor. And this happens even within the context of the sensory, i.e. immediate, fundamentally beginning knowledge: sensoriness as knowledge, as real basis of cognition, is thus by no means the same as (contemplative) perception. The concept of activity which is thus stressed by Marx in Thesis 1 in fact derives from idealistic epistemology, and not from idealistic epistemology as such, but only from that developed in the new bourgeois age. For this concept pre-supposes as a base a society where the ruling class sees or wishes to see itself in activity, i.e. work. However, this is only the case in capitalist society in so far as work, or rather: the appearance of work around the ruling class, in contrast to all pre- bourgeois societies is here no longer a dishonour, but is respected. This results out of the necessity of making profit, out of the forces of production being unleashed in this profit- society. Work, which had been held in contempt in the ancient slave-owning societies, even in feudal society with its system of serfdom (in Athens even sculptors were counted as philistines), is obviously not reflected in the thoughts of the ruling class either, in total contrast to the ideology of the entrepreneur, the bourgeois, the so-called homo faber. Whose profit-dynamic, becoming free in the new age, forming the new bourgeois age, still by a long chalk progressive, also certainly makes itself evident in the superstructure and activates the base itself. Both morally, in the shape of a so-called work ethic , and epistemologically, in the shape of a concept of activity, a work logos in cognition. The work ethic, preached particularly by the Calvinists for the purpose of creating capital, this capitalist vita activa contrasted with aristocratic idleness, and also with the vita contemplativa of a quiet, monkish, scholarly existence. In parallel fashion, the work logos in cognition, this concept of ‘producing’ particularly exaggerated in bourgeois rationalism, differed from the ancient and also scholastic cognitive concept of mere receiving: vision, visio, passive depiction. As it survives contained in the concept of ‘Theoria’ itself, consistent with the original vision-sense of the word. Even Plato is, cum grano salis, ultimately a receiving sensualist in this manner; for however ideally and purely related to ideas his vision pretends to be, it is in fact still essentially receptive vision, and the thought-process is consistently understood in keeping with sensory perception. But then even Democritus, the first great materialist , who in fact sets the tone until Marx, is likewise trapped in this work-shy ideology which does not reflect the work-process . Even Democritus only understands cognition in passive terms; thinking, through which for him the truly real is known, the real dimension of the atoms together with their mechanism, is explained here solely by the impression of corresponding little pictures (eidola), which detach themselves from the surface of things and flow into the person who is perceiving and knowing. On the question of epistemological non-activity there is therefore no difference at all between Plato and Democritus; both epistemologies are united by the slave-owning society, which means here: the absence of despised work-activity in the philosophical superstructure. And now: the paradox appears that rationalism, the idealism of the new age, which often distanced itself far from Plato, reflected the work-process much more powerfully in epistemological terms than the materialism of the new age, which never distanced itself very far from its ancient progenitor Democritus. The calmly depicting mirror, this omission of the concept of work, is thus, up to and including Feuerbach, materialistically more common than the pathos of ‘production’, and especially of the dialectical reciprocal depiction of subject-object, object- subject on to each other. Among the more recent materialists only Hobbes teaches rational ‘production’, with the principle which is valid until Kant: only such objects are knowable which can be constructed mathematically. But greatly though Hobbes, with the help of this principle, was able to define philosophy as theory of the mathematical-mechanical motion of bodies, and therefore as materialism, for his part he just as little succeeded in getting beyond the ‘form of the object’ criticized by Marx, namely beyond merely contemplative materialism. Something different occurred within idealism when ‘production’ passed from geometric construction into the real work-form of historical genesis . This was first decisively achieved in Hegel; the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ was the first work to discuss seriously the dynamics of the epistemological concept of work, at least in historical -idealistic terms. This was also far superior to the merely mathematical -idealistic ‘production’ pathos, which, in the case of the great rationalists of the manufacturing period, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, had influenced their semi- or total idealism. There is no better witness to this significance of Hegel’s Phenomenology, which was not in the least understood by Feuerbach, than Marx in the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’: Marx sees the greatness of the Phenomenology precisely in the fact that it ‘understands the essence of work and comprehends Objective man, true because real man, as a result of his own work’ (MEGA 1, 3, P. 156). This statement thus best explains the deficiency mentioned above of merely perceiving materialism, up to and including Feuerbach: previous materialism lacks the constantly oscillating subject-object relation called work . Hence in fact it understands the Object, reality, sensoriness only ‘under the form of the object’, omitting ‘human-sensory activity’. Whereas Hegel’s Phenomenology occupied, as Marx says, ‘the standpoint of modern political economy’ (1.c., p. 157). Feuerbach, however, still occupied in epistemological terms the standpoint of slave-owning society or even of serfdom, on account of the non-active, still contemplatory element in his materialism.

At the same time Marx of course makes it clear that bourgeois activity is still not the complete, right kind. It cannot be so precisely because it is only appearance of work, because the production of value never emanates from the entrepreneur, but from peasants, manual workers, ultimately wage-earners. And because the abstract, reified, confused circulation of goods on the free market allowed nothing more than an ultimately passive, external, abstract relationship to it. For this reason Thesis I stresses: even the epistemological reflection of activity could only be an abstract one, ‘since idealism of course does not know real, sensory activity as such’. However, even the bourgeois materialist Feuerbach, who wishes to get away from abstract thinking, who seeks real Objects rather than reified thoughts, omits human activity from this real being; he understands it ‘not even as Objective activity’. This is strikingly elaborated in the introduction to the ‘German Ideology’: ‘Feuerbach is speaking specifically of the perception of natural science, he mentions secrets which only became apparent to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and trade? Even this ‘pure’ natural science of course receives its purpose and material only through trade and industry, through sensory activity of men. The activity, this continuing sensory working and creating, this production is so much the basis of the whole of the sensory world that, even if it were interrupted for only a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but very soon also miss the whole human world and his own ability to perceive, indeed his own existence. Of course the priority of external nature remains at the same time, and of course all this is not applicable to original men, produced through generatio aequivoca; but this distinction only makes sense in so far as man is regarded as being different from nature. This nature which precedes human society is not incidentally the nature in which Feuerbach lives, not the nature which no longer exists anywhere today except perhaps on one or two Australian coral islands of more recent origin, i.e. does not exist for Feuerbach either’ (MEGA 1, 5, P. 33f.). How crucially human work, which precisely as an Object is completely homeless in Feuerbach, is emphasized in these lines as an important, if not the most important Object in the world which surrounds men.

Accordingly, therefore, the Being that conditions everything now itself contains active men. This has quite astonishing consequences, they make Thesis 3 above all especially important – challenging not only Feuerbach, but also vulgar Marxists. Two further concepts of the ‘sensory world’, a bad one and one that is often misunderstood, are therefore worth noting in this truly Objective connection, they are most intimately related to it. They concern, after all, the empiricist favourite children or even trump-cards of that supposedly activity-shy perception which sees the ‘circumstances’ merely as that which is standing around men. One is so-called givenness , a particularly object-based, i.e. apparently materialistically related concept. However, apart from the fact that it is, semantically, a changeable concept that would not be valid if there were no subject to which alone something is given or can be given, there is in the world which constitutes the human environment hardly anything given which is not equally something worked on . Hence Marx speaks of the ‘material’ which natural science only receives through trade and industry. In reality, only surface contemplation shows the given; after a little probing, however, every Object of our normal environment reveals itself to be by no means sheer datum. It proves itself instead to be the end result of previous work-processes, and even the raw material, apart from the fact that it is totally changed, was fetched from the forest by work or hewn out of the rocks or extracted from the depths of the earth. So much for the first passive trump- card which is obviously not one at all, but only counts and wins the trick from the surface standpoint. The second trump-card of supposedly activity-shy perception, however, does employ a perfectly legitimate, in fact decidedly materialistic concept to begin with, namely the primacy of being over consciousness . In epistemological terms this primacy expresses itself as the external world which exists independently of human consciousness, in historical terms as priority of the material base over the mind. But once again Feuerbach hardened this truth one-sidedly, he exaggerated it mechanistically, in that he omitted activity here too. Within the province of normal human environment, independence of being from consciousness is by no means the same as independence of being from human work. The independence of this external world from consciousness, its Objectivity, is instead so far from being cancelled by the mediation of work with the external world that it is in fact ultimately formulated by it. For just as human activity is itself Objective activity, i.e. does not fall out of the external world, so the subject-object-mediation, in that it occurs, is likewise a piece of external world. This external world also exists independently of consciousness in that it does not itself appear under the form of the subject, but admittedly not only ‘under the form of the object’ either.

But in fact it represents the interacting mediation of subject and object , in such a way that being does indeed determine consciousness everywhere, but once again historically decisive, namely economic being contains an inordinate amount of objective consciousness. All being is for Feuerbach, however, autarkical primacy, as purely pre-human base, natural base, with man as blossom, but in fact simply as blossom, not as separate natural force. But the human method of production, the metabolism with nature which occurs and is regulated in the work process, even the relations of production as base, all this, illuminatingly, itself has consciousness in it; likewise the material base in every society is again activated by the superstructure of consciousness. Thesis 3 is especially informative concerning the interaction in this being-consciousness relationship, despite the priority of economic being. But it is information which gives no pleasure to vulgar materialism; it does however give human consciousness the most real place in the ‘circumstances’, that is, precisely inside the external world which it helps to form. Mechanistic environmentalism asserts ‘that men are products of circumstances and of education, changed men therefore products of other circumstances and a different education’. Above this one-sided, often even very naturalistic theory of depiction (milieu like soil, climate) Thesis 3 now posits the truth which is so superior to the previous standard materialism, ‘that circumstances are in fact changed by men, and that the educator must himself be educated’. This does not of course mean that this change of circumstances could now happen without reference to that objective lawfulness which also binds the subject- and activity-factor. Rather, Marx is waging a war on two fronts at this point, he is struggling both against mechanistic environmentalism, which ends in fatalism of being, and against the idealistic subject-theory, which ends in putschism, or at least in exaggerated activity-optimism. One passage in the ‘German Ideology’ thus thoroughly complements Thesis 3, namely because it deals with the most salutary reciprocal movement of men and circumstances, of subject-object mediation of a constantly interacting, constantly dialectical kind. So that in history ‘on every level a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relationship to nature and of individuals to one another is to be found, which is passed on to each generation by its predecessor, a class of productive forces, capital and circumstances which is indeed on the one hand modified by the new generation, but which on the other hand also prescribes to it its own conditions of life and gives it a particular development, a special character – so that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’ (MEGA 1, 5, p. 27f.). As stated above, the interaction between subject and object is particularly emphasized in this passage, even with the audible precedence of the circumstance -man-relationship over the reverse, in such a way, however, that man and his activity always remain the specific part of the material historical base, indeed represent its root, as it were, and also its capability for radical change. Even the idea (in theory) becomes a material power, according to Marx, if it seizes the masses; how unequivocally the technological-political changing of circumstances is such a power, and how clearly even the subject-factor understood in these terms remains inside the material world. ‘Das Kapital’ provides a final elaboration of Thesis 3, now committing man quite decisively to the external world, in fact to nature: ‘He sets in motion the natural forces pertaining to his physical nature, arms and legs, head and hands, in order to acquire natural material in a form useful for his own life. Because he acts on and changes nature outside himself through this movement, he simultaneously changes his own nature . . . The earth is itself a working material, but presupposes a whole series of other working materials before it can serve as working material in agriculture, and an already relatively high development of working capacity’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, p. 185, 187). Thus human activity with its consciousness is itself explained as a piece of nature, moreover as the most important piece, in fact as radical practice precisely at the base of material being, which again primarily conditions the consciousness that follows. Feuerbach, who felt no revolutionary mission whatsoever and who also never got beyond man as a nature-based generic being, had no appreciation whatsoever of this increased primacy of nature, increased by human activity . This is ultimately the reason why history does not appear in his purely perceiving materialism and why he does not manage to get beyond the contemplative attitude. Thus his relationship to the object remains ancient- aristocratic, in illogical contrast to the pathos of man which he put – again only in purely theoretical terms and as mere blossom of existing nature – at the centre of his critique of religion (and no other). He thus looks down on practice from on high, which he only knows as a demeaning business: ‘Practical perception is a dirty perception stained with egotism’ (Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841, p. 264). It is this passage to which Marx is ultimately referring in Thesis 1 when he says that in Feuerbach ‘practice is only understood and fixed in its dirty-Jewish manifestation’. And how much arrogance of this kind there was later when the ‘perception’ increasingly ‘stained with egotism’ was added ideologically to so- called pure perception, then with a so-called truth for its own sake. How much ‘equestrian science’ then arose, high on its horse, au dessus de la m�l�e (apart from the dirt in itself); how much aristocracy of knowledge (without aristoi), knowingly in league with dirty practice, restraining from the correct kind. With great presentiment Marx already posited the pathos of ‘revolutionary, practical-critical activity’ against such pure lack of understanding as Feuerbach’s. Thus Marx emphasizes, precisely as a materialist, precisely inside being itself, the subjective factor of production activity which is, exactly like the objective factor, an Objective one. And this has powerful, and in fact also anti-vulgar-materialistic consequences; they make this part of the Feuerbach Theses particularly valuable. Without the comprehended work-factor itself the primacy of being, which is in no way a factum brutum or given fact, cannot be comprehended in human history. It most certainly cannot be mediated with the best aspect of active perception with which Thesis 1 closes; with ‘the revolutionary, practical-critical activity’. Working man, this subject-object relation living in all ‘circumstances’, belongs in Marx decisively with the material base; even the subject in the world is world.

Anthropological-Historical Group: Self-Alienation and True Materialism Theses 4, 6, 7, 9, 10

It is recognized here that as human beings we always proceed from alienation. Thesis 4 states the theme: Feuerbach revealed self-alienation in its religious form. His work therefore consisted in ‘dissolving the religious world into its worldly basis. But’, Marx continues, ‘he overlooks the fact that, after the completion of this work, the main task still remains to be done.’ Feuerbach, as Thesis 6 determines more precisely, had put religious existence on to a worldly basis in so far as he dissolved it into human existence. This was an important undertaking in itself, especially since it cast a sharp glance at the contribution of human wishes. Feuerbach’s ‘anthropological critique of religion’ derived the whole of the transcendental sphere from wishful imagination: the gods are the heartfelt wishes transformed into real beings. At the same time there arises through this wish-hypostasis a doubling of the world into an imaginary and a real one; when man shifts his best being from this world into a celestial other world. It is therefore necessary to remove this self-alienation, that is, to fetch back heaven to men again through critical anthropology and by identifying its origins. Here, however, the logical Marxist argument comes into force, which did not stop at the abstract genus of man, which is quite unstructured in class and historical terms. Feuerbach, who had reproached Hegel so strongly on account of his concept-reifications, does indeed localize his abstract genus of man empirically, but only in such a way as to allow it to be inherent in the single individual, free of society, without social history. Thesis 6 therefore stresses: ‘But human existence is not an abstract inherent in the single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social conditions.’ Indeed, with his hollow arc between single individual and abstract Humanum (while omitting society) Feuerbach is little other than an epigone of the Stoics and of their after-effects in Natural Right, in the ideas of tolerance of the new bourgeois age. Even Stoic morality had fallen back upon the private individual after the decline of the Greek public polis: this was, Marx says in his doctoral dissertation, ‘the good fortune of its time; thus the moth, when the common sun has gone down, seeks the private lamplight’ (MEGA I, 1/1, p. 133). On the other hand, however, the abstract genus of man, skipping all national social conditions, was supposed to assert itself in the Stoics as a sole Universal over single individuals, as the place of the communis opinio, of the recta ratio for all times, among all peoples: i.e. as the general human house, incorporated into the equally general-good world house. Only this human house was not the vanished polis, but it was half – with assiduous ideology – the Pax Romana, the cosmopolitan empire of Rome, and half – with abstract utopia – a fraternal human league of enlightened individuals. Not without reason, therefore, did the concept of humanitas arise as both a generic and value concept at the court of Scipio the Younger, and the Stoic Panaitios was its author. With his abstract genus of man Feuerbach then above all absorbed the neo-Stoicism which – again with hollow arc between individual and generality – had emerged in the new bourgeois age. This ultimately in the abstract-sublime concept of the citoyen and in the Kantian pathos of humanity in general, which reflected the citoyen in a German and moral way. The individuals of the new age are of course capitalists, not Stoic private pillars, and their Universal was not the ancient oecumene which was supposed to eliminate nations, but – with idealization precisely of the ancient polis – the generality of bourgeois human rights with the abstract citizen above it, this moral-humanitarian generic ideal. Nevertheless, there are important economically conditioned correspondences here (otherwise there would have been no neo- Stoicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries): here as there society is atomized into individuals, here as there an abstract genus rises above it, an abstract ideal of humanity, humanness. Marx, however, criticizes precisely this abstract above mere individuals, in fact defines human existence as ‘ensemble of social conditions’. That is why Thesis 6 is directed both against Feuerbach’s ahistorical view of humanness per se and – connected with this – against the purely anthropological generic concept of this humanity, as a generality which unites the many individuals in a merely natural way. Marx still definitely retains the value -concept of humanity of course; he does so clearly in Thesis 10. The expression ‘real humanism’ with which the preface to the ‘Holy Family’ begins is of course abandoned by the ‘German Ideology’, in connection with the rejection of any trace of bourgeois democracy, with the gaining of the proletarian- revolutionary standpoint, with the creation of dialectical-historical materialism. But Thesis 10 nevertheless states with all the value-accent of a humanistic opposition, of a ‘real humanism’ therefore, which however is only valid and accepted to be valid as a socialist humanism: ‘The standpoint of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the standpoint of the new materialism, human society or socialized humanity.’ The Humanum therefore does not always lie in every society ‘as inner, silent generality which unites the many individuals in a merely natural way’, it does not lie in any kind of existing generality at all, it is to be found instead in difficult process and gains itself only together with communism, as communism. For this very reason, the new, proletarian standpoint, far from removing the value-concept of humanism, in practice allows it to come home for the very first time; and the more scientific the socialism, the more concretely it has precisely the care for man at its centre, the real removal of his self-alienation as its goal . Certainly not, however, after Feuerbach’s fashion, as an abstract genus equipped with all too sublime humane sacraments per se. Marx therefore incorporates the very motif of the epistemological Thesis-group into Thesis 9, this time against Feuerbach’s anthropology: ‘The highest to which perceiving materialism can attain, i.e. the materialism which does not comprehend sensoriness as practical activity, is the perception of single individuals in ‘'bourgeois society.”’ A class barrier is thus finally noted, the same barrier which blocked revolutionary activity in Feuerbach’s epistemology, and now blocks history and society in his anthropology. Marx’s continuation of Feuerbachian anthropology, as a critique of religious self-alienation, is therefore not only logically consistent, but also a renewed demystification, namely of Feuerbach himself or of final, anthropological fetishization. Thus Marx leads us from general-ideal man, via mere individuals, to the ground of real humanity and possible humanness.

In order to do this, the glance at the processes which really underlie alienation was necessary. Men double their world not only because they have an inwardly torn, wishing consciousness. Rather, this consciousness arises together with its religious reflection from a much closer split, namely a social one. The social conditions themselves are inwardly torn and divided, show an Above and a Below, struggles between these two classes and hazy ideologies of the Above, of which the religious is only one among many. To find this closer aspect of the worldly basis was for Marx precisely the work whose main task still remained to be done, – itself a This World compared with the abstract-anthropological This World of Feuerbach. Feuerbach, an undialectical stranger to history, had no eye for this, but Thesis 4 acquires it: ‘The very fact that the worldly basis sets itself off from itself and fixes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the self-conflict and the self- contradiction of this worldly basis. The latter itself must therefore first be understood in its contradiction and then be revolutionized by eliminating the contradiction in practice. Hence for example, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must now itself be criticized and radically changed in practice.’ In order to be truly radical, i.e. according to Marx’s definition: in order to grasp things by the radix, by the ‘root’, the critique of religion thus requires the critique of the conditions which underlie heaven, of their wretchedness, of their contradictions and their false, imaginary resolution of these contradictions. Marx had already formulated this so forcibly and unmistakably in the ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ of 1844: ‘The critique of religion ends ... with the categorical imperative of overthrowing all conditions in which man is a debased, an enslaved, a forlorn, a contemptible being’ (MEGA I, 1/1, p. 614f.). Only after this progressive critique, which is also progressive in practical revolutionary terms, do we arrive at a situation which no longer requires any illusions, either as deception or even as compensation: ‘The critique has picked to pieces the imaginary flowers on the chain, not so that man has to wear the dreary chain devoid of imagination, but so that he can throw off the chain and pick the living flower’ (1.c., p. 608). In order to do this, the earthly family must first be discovered as the secret of the heavenly one, right down to that matured economic- materialistic ‘secret science’ which then causes Marx to say in ‘Das Kapital’: ‘Besides, little familiarity is required with the history of the Roman Republic, for example, to know that the history of property forms its secret history’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, P. 88). Consequently, the analysis of religious self-alienation, in order for it to be a truly radical one, fundamentally goes beyond ideologies to the closer role of the state, to the very closest political economy and achieves here for the first time real ‘anthropology’. Achieves it as social-scientific basic insight into the ‘relation of men to men and to nature’. Since, as Thesis 7 stresses, ‘the religious disposition is itself a social product’, the act of producing can and must not be forgotten over the product, as it is by the unhistorical, undialectical Feuerbach. The following passage in ‘Das Kapital’ once more refers to this ultimate half-measure, that is, untenability of Feuerbach’s dissolution: ‘It is in fact much easier to find the earthly core of the nebulous shapes of religion through analysis than conversely to develop deified forms from the respective conditions of real life. The latter is the only materialistic and therefore scientific method. The defects of abstractly natural scientific materialism which excludes the historical process can already be seen from the abstract and ideological ideas of its spokesmen, as soon as they venture out beyond their specialized field’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, p. 389). Furthermore the ‘German Ideology’ states: ‘In Feuerbach materialism and history completely fall apart’, thus establishing the basic difference between dialectical-historical materialism and the old mechanical kind:

‘Whenever Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not appear in his work, and whenever he takes history into account, he is no materialist’ (MEGA I, 5, P. 34). Feuerbach himself had claimed that he was a materialist looking backwards (i.e. regarding the basis of nature), but an idealist looking forwards (i.e. regarding ethics and even the philosophy of religion). Precisely the omission of society, history and its dialectic in Feuerbach’s materialism, precisely the feeling occasioned by this that life is missing in the old mechanical materialism, which was the only kind Feuerbach knew, inevitably causes an idealism of an embarrassed kind in this philosopher at the end of his philosophy. It revealed itself clearly in his ethics of life, it shows itself in the hints of a certain Sunday-brotherhood sentimentality. Once again the governing influence here is merely, as Thesis 9 says, ‘the perception of single individuals in “bourgeois society"’, but once again even religion , which had ostensibly been disposed of, makes itself apparent in Feuerbach, a religion which was merely derived anthropologically by him, not socially criticized. This is evident in the way that Feuerbach does not actually criticize the contents of religion, but essentially only their displacement into an other world and thus the weakening of man and his This World. In so far as he consequently sought to remind ‘human nature’ of its squandered wealth again, there are of course undoubtedly problems involved in this reduction. Who would wish to underestimate precisely the depth of humanity, the humanity of the depth in religion-charged art, in Giotto, in Gr�newald, in Bach and ultimately even perhaps in Bruckner? But Feuerbach, with unparalleled heart, soul brotherhood and melting soul, makes out of all this almost a kind of non-denominational pectoral theology . Moreover, he allows almost all the attributes of the father-god to remain, in the unavoidable emptiness of his ‘idealism forwards’, as virtues in themselves so to speak, and only the heavenly god is struck from the list. Instead of: God is merciful, is love, is omnipotent, works miracles, hears our prayers – all that can be said now is: mercifulness, love, omnipotence, working miracles, hearing prayers are divine. Accordingly, therefore, the whole apparatus of theology remains intact, it has just moved from its heavenly location to a certain abstract region, with reified virtues of the ‘natural basis’. In this way, however, the problem: humane legacy of religion, which Feuerbach probably had in mind, did not arise, but religion came at a reduced price, to suit a poorly demystified habitual embourgeoisement, which Engels correctly identifies in Feuerbach’s stale dregs of religion. Marxism, conversely, is no ‘idealism forwards’ even with regard to religion, but materialism forwards, wealth of materialism without a poorly demystified heaven which must be brought down to earth. The truly total explanation of the world from within itself, which is called dialectical-historical materialism, also posits the transformation of the world from within itself. Into an other world beyond hardship, which has not the least in common either with the other world of mythology, or with its master- or father-contents.

Theory-Practice-Group: Proof and Probation Theses 2, 8

It is not recognized here that thought is pale and feeble. Thesis 2 sets it above sensory perception, with and in which it merely commences. Feuerbach had denigrated thought, because it leads away from the individual into the general; this was evaluated nominalistically. In Marx, however, thought definitely does not aim into the poorly general, abstract, but just the opposite: it opens up precisely the mediated essential context of the appearance, one which is still sealed to the mere sensoriness in the appearance. Thus thought, which Feuerbach only allows to be abstract, is concrete precisely when it is mediated, whereas conversely, thoughtless sensory material is abstract. Thought must of course lead once again to perception, in order to prove itself, as pervasive, in the latter, but even at this end this perception is by no means the passive, immediate Feuerbachian kind. The proof can instead only lie in the mediatedness of the perception, that is, solely in that sensoriness which has been theoretically processed and has thus become Thing For Us . This is however ultimately the sensoriness of theoretically mediated, theoretically acquired practice . So the function of thought is, even more than sensory perception, an activity, a critical, insistent, revealing activity; and the best proof is thus the practical testing of this deciphering. Just as every truth is a truth for a certain purpose, and there is no truth for its own sake, except as self-deception or whimsy, so too there is no complete proof of a truth from within itself as a truth which merely remains theoretical; in other words: there is no theoretically-immanently possible complete proof . Only a partial proof can be achieved purely theoretically, mostly still in mathematics; but even here it proves to be only a partial proof of a specific kind, since in fact it never gets beyond mere inner ‘agreement’, logically consistent ‘correctness’. Correctness is not yet truth, however, that is, depiction of reality and also the power of intervening in reality according to the measure of its known agencies and laws. In other words: truth is not a theory relationship alone, but a definite theory-practice relationship . Thus Thesis 2 states: ‘The question of whether Objective truth is appropriate to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the This-worldliness of his thinking. The argument about the reality or non-reality of a thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question.’ That is, a school-bound question in the sense of a dosed thought-immanence (including mechanical-materialistic thoughts); this contemplative boarding-school was the space of all previous concepts of truth. With its theory-practice relationship, Thesis 2 is therefore wholly creative and new; in comparison, previous philosophy really does appear ‘scholastic’. Since, as observed above, either ancient and medieval epistemology did not reflect activity, or on the other hand activity as bourgeois-abstract activity was not truly mediated with its object. In both cases, in the ages of the ancient and feudal contempt for work and in the age of the bourgeois work-ethic (without concreteness of work), practice, both technological and political, was regarded at best as the ‘application’ of theory. Not as attestation that the theory is a concrete one, as in Marx, not as the functional change of the key into the lever, of true depiction into intervention with power over being.

Thus the right thought and doing what is right finally become one and the same. Activity and partisan attitude are contained within it from the beginning, and therefore emerge again as true conclusion at the end. The colour of the resolution is its own in this conclusion, not an additional colour brought in from elsewhere. Every confrontation in the history of philosophy confirms in this case the Novum of the theory-practice relationship as opposed to mere ‘application’ of theory. Even when a part of the theory was already aimed at practice: as in Socrates, as in Plato when he tried to realize his utopian state in Sicily, as in the Stoics with logic as mere wall, physics as mere tree, but with ethics as the fruit. As in Augustine, the founder of the site of the medieval papal church, as at the end of the Middle Ages in William of Occam, the nominalist destroyer of the papal church in favour of rising national states. There was undoubtedly a social and practical mission behind all these, but the theory nevertheless led its own abstract, practically unmediated separate existence. It only condescended to ‘application’ to practice, like a prince to his people, at best like an idea to its utilization. And even Bacon, in the sharp bourgeois-practical utilitarianism of the new age: he did indeed teach that knowledge is power, he wanted to re-establish the whole of science and to give it a new aim, as ars inveniendi, but, despite all opposition to purely theoretical knowledge and contemplative cognition, science remains autarkical, and only its method is to be changed. Changed in the sense of the inductive method, the methodically directed experiment; the proof, however, does not lie in practice, this is rather regarded even here only as the fruit and reward of truth, not as its final criterion and as demonstration. The various ‘philosophies of action’, which derived from Fichte and from Hegel, and then again, going back to Fichte, arose in the left-wing school of Hegelians, have even less similarity with Marx’s practice-criterion. Fichte’s ‘active deeds’ may itself have shown power and line on important national political points, but ultimately it always proved ethereal. In the end, it simply served not so much to better the world of the Not-I by processing it as to remove it completely. All that was proved, so to speak, by this basically world-hostile ‘practice’ was the in any case settled subjective starting-point of Fichtean ego-idealism, not however an objective truth which first develops with and through the world. Hegel comes closest to a premonition of a practice-criterion, and in fact characteristically on account of the relationship to work in his phenomenology. In addition, a transition occurs in Hegel’s psychology from ‘theoretical mind’ (perception, imagination, thinking) to the antithesis ‘practical mind’ (feeling, driving will, bliss), out of which then, synthetically, ‘free mind’ was to result. Thus this synthesis proclaimed itself as the self-knowing will, as will which thinks and knows itself, which ultimately, in ‘the rational State’, wants what it knows and knows what it wants. Likewise the ‘practical idea’ is already classed above the ‘idea of contemplated cognition’ in Hegelian logic, in so far as ‘not only the dignity of what is general, but also of what is simply real’ is appropriate to the practical good (Werke V, p. 320f.). ‘All this’, notes Lenin, ‘in the chapter “The idea of cognition” . . . , undoubtedly means that in Hegel practice is a link in the chain in the analysis of the process of cognition . . . Consequently Marx is establishing a direct link with Hegel when he introduces the criterion of practice into epistemology; see the Theses on Feuerbach’ (Aus dem philosophischen Nachla�, Dietz 1949, p. 133). However, at the end of his Logic, just as at the end of his Phenomenology and of his fully-developed system, Hegel leads the world (the Object, the object, the substance) almost as far back into the subject as Fichte does; so that in the end, it is not practice which crowns truth, but ‘re-minding’, ‘science of appearing knowledge’ and nothing more. And also, according to Hegel’s famous statement at the end of the preface to his ‘Philosophy of Right’, ‘philosophy always comes too late anyway. It only appears as the thought of the world in the time after which reality has completed its formation-process and finished itself.’ The closed- circuit thinker Hegel, the antiquarium of what is unalterably already existing, thus ultimately prevailed over the dialectical process-thinker Hegel with his crypto-practice. There is still – in order to measure the distance of Marx’s doctrine of practice even in the immediate environment of his youth – the practice, soon also sharp practice of the left-wing Hegelians and all that goes along with it. This was the ‘weapon of criticism’, the so-called ‘philosophy of action’, when Marx was young. But what was at work here in fact was essentially only a return from the objective idealism of Hegel to the subjective idealism of Fichte; Feuerbach himself identified this in Bruno Bauer. This series of so-called philosophies of action began with the otherwise not uninteresting work by Cieszkovski: ‘Prolegomena to Historiosophy’, 1838, a work which expressly presents it as necessary to use philosophy to change the world.

Thus in these ‘Prolegomena’ there are even appeals for rational research into the tendencies of history: so that the correct course of action can be taken; so that not instinctive, but conscious actions form world history; so that the will is brought to the same peak to which reason had been brought by Hegel; so that in this way a not only pre- but also post-theoretical practice can gain space. This all sounds significant, and yet it remained only declaratory, resulted in absolutely nothing even in Cieszkovski’s other writings, in fact the ‘interests of the future’ became more and more irrational and obscure in his work. Cieszkovski’s rejection of speculation became a rejection of reason, activity became an activity of ‘active intuition’, and the whole will towards the future ultimately ended in a theosophy of – Amen in the orthodox church, published at the time of the ‘Communist Manifesto’. In Marx’s own circle there was still Bruno Bauer’s work of course, likewise a ‘philosophy of action’, even one of the Last Judgement, but in fact the most subjective of all. When reactionary thinking under Friedrich Wilhelm IV put this ‘weapon of criticism’ to the test, in Bruno Bauer it immediately retreated into individualism, in fact into an egocentricity contemptuous of the masses. Bauer’s ‘critical critique’ was simply a battle in and between thoughts, a kind of l'art pour l'art-practice of the arrogant mind with itself, and eventually Stirner’s ‘The Lone Individual and his Property’ developed from it. Marx himself has said the decisive thing about this in the ‘Holy Family’, on his own account, as is evident, in the cause of genuine practice and its unmistakableness. In the cause of revolutionary practice: beginning with the proletariat, equipped with the fruitful aspect of the Hegelian dialectic and not with abstractions from the ‘wilted and widowed philosophy of Hegel’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 189), let alone of Fichtean subjectivism. Fichte, the virtuous man of wrath, did at least still have energetic directives in view, from the ‘Closed Commercial State’ to the ‘Speeches to the German Nation’, he philosophized the French out of Germany; the ‘critical critique’, however, merely paraded in the Tattersalls of self-importance. And, closer to Marx, even in the work of the thoroughly honest Socialist Moses Hess action had a tendency to detach itself from social activity, to reduce itself to reform of moral consciousness – a ‘philosophy of action’ without developed economic theory behind it, without a timetable of dialectically comprehended tendency within it. The concepts of practice until Marx are therefore completely different from his theory-practice conception, from the doctrine of unity between theory and practice . And rather than merely being glued on to theory, in such a way that thought remains purely scientific and does not in the least require ‘application’, in such a way that theory continues to pursue its own life and its immanent self-sufficiency even in its proofs, according to Marx and Lenin, theory and practice continually oscillate. Since both alternately and reciprocally swing into one another, practice presupposes theory, just as it itself further releases and needs new theory in order to continue a new practice. Concrete thought had never been valued more highly than it was here, where it became the light for action, and never had action been valued more highly than here, where it became the crowning of truth.

And warmth also definitely seeks to be inherent in thinking here, since it is helpful thinking. The warmth of wanting-to-help itself, of love for the victims, of hatred of the exploiters. Indeed these feelings bring partiality into play, without which no true knowledge combined with good action is at all possible in socialist terms. But a feeling of love which is not itself illuminated by cognition blocks the very helping action on which it would like to embark. It is sated all too easily by its own excellence, becomes the haze of a new pseudo-active self- confidence. In this case not a l'art pour l'art-critical self-confidence, as in Bruno Bauer, but a sentimentally uncritical one which is stifling and vague. As in Feuerbach himself: he always set his equivocation ‘sensation’ in place of practice. He defuses love into the general emotional relation between I and You, he reveals the lack of any social cognition even here by retreating to mere individuals and their eternally languishing relationships. He effeminates humanity thus: ‘The new philosophy is in relation to its base (!) itself nothing more than the nature of sensation raised into consciousness – it affirms only in and with reason what every person – the real person – admits in his heart’ (Werke II, 1846, p. 324). This statement is from the ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’, in fact it is the action-substitute from the past, from a bourgeois-conformist, sanctimonious, indeed, very often, Tartuffishly sabotaging past. From a past which, precisely because of its abstractly declamatory love of mankind, does not in the least seek to change the world today for the good, but to perpetuate it in the bad. Feuerbach’s caricature of the Sermon on the Mount excludes all harshness in prosecuting injustice, while including total laxness in the class struggle; for this very reason general ‘socialism’ of love recommends itself to all the crocodile tears of a capitalistically interested philanthropy. Hence Marx and Engels: ‘The kingdom of love was preached precisely as opposed to bad reality, to hatred . . . But when experience teaches that this love has not become effective in 1800 years, that it has not been able to transform social conditions, nor to establish its kingdom, then it quite obviously follows from this that this love which has not been able to conquer hatred does not supply the active energy necessary for social reforms. This love gets lost in sentimental phrases through which no real, factual conditions can be removed; it makes man lethargic with the enormous emotional pap on which it feeds him. Therefore deprivation gives man strength; those who must help themselves, do help themselves. And that is why the real conditions of this world, the sharp contrast in society today between capital and work, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, as they appear in their most developed form in industrial trade, are the other , more powerfully bubbling source of the socialist world-view, of the desire for social reforms ... This iron necessity creates a wide audience and active adherents for socialist endeavour, and it will pave the way for the socialist reforms through transformation of present conditions of trade sooner than all the love which glows in all the hearts brimming with feeling in the world’ (Circular against H. Kriege, a supporter of Feuerbach, 11th May 1846). Since then, what Thomas M�nzer would not only have called ‘contrived belief’ but also ‘contrived love’, has spread in quite a different way than in Feuerbach’s relatively harmless time, among renegades and pseudo-socialists. Their hypocritical love of mankind is however only the weapon of war of a much more total hatred: namely of communism; and the newly contrived love is only there for the sake of the war. Together with the mysticism which is not lacking even in Feuerbach, which here still at least wished to be ‘forward idealism’, i.e. progressive, and which, in the formless roaring of the fulfilment of its heart, of its God-the-Fatherliness made anthropological, had no worse shortcoming than the poorly demystified, non-denominational philistinism mentioned above. But the mysteries of today’s profound babbling which is no longer even idealistic – almost as different from Feuerbach’s mysticism as this was from the mysticism of Meister Eckhart – hide their heart up their sleeves, and instead of the empty rosy mist there is today a nothingness exploited by the bourgeoisie. Thesis 8 says: ‘All mysteries which lead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the rational solution of this practice.’ Here of course a distinction is being made between two types of mysteries: namely those which present what is unclarified, aporias, forest of uncomprehended contradictions as still uncomprehended in reality, and those, called actual mysticisms, which are idolatry of darkness for its own sake. But even things that are simply unfathomed, and especially the misty-line in them, can lead into mysticism; for this very reason only rational practice is the human solution here, and the rational solution only human practice, which keeps to humanity (rather than the forest). And even the word mysticism is not used without reason by Marx on the subject of Feuerbach, in fact it is used against the non-sword of abstract love which leaves the Gordian knot alone. To repeat: Feuerbach’s mysteries, the love-mysteries without clarity, certainly have nothing in common with that which later emerged as rottenness and night-irratio; Feuerbach lies instead on that German salvation-line which leads from Hegel to Marx, just as the German disaster-line leads from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and the consequences. And love of mankind, in so far as it clearly understands itself as being directed towards the exploited, in so far as it proceeds towards real knowledge, is undoubtedly an imperative agent in socialism. But if the salt can lose his savour, how much more so the sugar its sweetness, and if Christians of feeling remain locked in defeatism, how much more so socialists of feeling in pharisaical betrayal. Hence Marx also attacks in Feuerbach a dangerous inflatedness, one which enjoys itself as it is, on the bottom line a pectoral practice which achieves the opposite of what the altruism it preaches to and its ineffably universal love intend. Without factions in love, with an equally concrete pole of hatred, there is no genuine love; without partiality of the revolutionary class standpoint there only remains backward idealism instead of forward practice. Without the primacy of the head to the very end there are only mysteries of resolution rather than the resolution of mysteries. At the ethical conclusion of Feuerbach’s philosophy of the future both philosophy and future are missing; Marx’s theory for the sake of practice started both functioning, and ethics at last becomes flesh.

The Password and Its Meaning Thesis 11

It is recognized here that the future aspect is the nearest and most important. But not in fact after Feuerbach’s fashion, which never sets sail. Which contents itself from beginning to end with contemplation, which leaves things as they are. Or even worse, which believes it cannot help but rearrange things, but only in the book, while the world itself notices nothing of it. One reason why it notices nothing of it is because the world can so easily be rearranged in false representations that nothing real appears in the book at all. Every step outwards would be damaging here to the neatly figured-out book living in its own nature reserve and would disturb the private life of invented thoughts. But even the most authentic books and doctrines often show the typically contemplative desire to be satisfied with themselves in their framed context, one successfully achieved at last ‘in terms of a work’. Consequently they even fear a change in the portrayed world which might possibly arise out of themselves, because the work – even if, like Feuerbach’s, it sets up principles of the future – could then no longer hover through the ages in such an autarkical manner. Especially if, as was again the case in Feuerbach, this was supplemented by an intended or naive political indifference, the public was wholly confined to the equally contemplative reader; his arms, his actions were not addressed. The standpoint may have been a new one, but it remained a mere vantage point; conceptual invention thus gave no instructions for real intervention. Hence, briefly and antithetically, Marx states the celebrated Thesis 11: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it.’ A significant difference to every previous impetus to thought is thus strikingly designated.

Short propositions, as we noted at the beginning, sometimes seem as if they can be assessed more quickly than they in fact can. And with celebrated propositions there is sometimes the problem that, very much against their will, they no longer stimulate reflection, or that we swallow them too raw. Then from time to time they cause us difficulty, in this case difficulty which is hostile to intelligence, at least alien to intelligence, and which could not be further from the sense of the proposition. What exactly is intended by Thesis 11 then, how must it be understood in Marx’s invariably precise philosophical sense? It must not be understood or rather: misused by mixing it in any way with pragmatism. The latter stems from a region which is utterly alien to Marxism, from a region which is hostile to it, intellectually inferior, ultimately downright disreputable. Nevertheless, ‘busy bodies’, as they say in America, i.e. bustlers, repeatedly subscribe to Marx’s proposition, just as if it was – American cultural barbarity. Underlying American pragmatism is the view that truth is nothing more than the commercial usefulness of ideas. Consequently, there is a so-called aha-experience of truth, as soon and in so far as this is aimed at practical success and actually shows itself to be suitable for bringing it about. In William James ('Pragmatism’, 1907), the businessman, as ‘American way of life’, to a certain extent still appears to be generally human, is so to speak garnished in a humanitarian way, even in an almost life-promoting and optimistic way. Both on account of the pink packaging of American capitalism still possible at that time, and above all on account of the tendency of every class society to present its special interest as that of the whole of humanity. This is why pragmatism initially also professed to be the patron of those various, interchangeable, logical ‘instruments’ with which the higher order of businessman achieves almost ‘humanitarian success’.

But there is no more such a thing, even less such a thing as a humanitarian businessman than there is such a thing as a Marxist playboy; thus after James, pragmatism in America and in the whole of the world-bourgeoisie quickly showed itself for what it is: the final agnosticism of a society stripped of any will towards the truth. Two imperialist wars, the first generally imperialist war from 1914 to 1918, the second partially imperialist war of the Nazi aggressors, made pragmatism ripe even for horse-trader ideology. Now it is no longer a question of truth at all, not even as if it were at least an ‘instrument’ to be maintained; and the pink package of ‘humanitarian success’ completely went to the devil who was in it from the beginning. Now ideas wavered and changed like share prices, according to the war situation, the business situation; until finally the utterly disgraceful pragmatism of the Nazis appeared. What served the German nation, i.e. what served German capital finance, was right; what furthered the interests of life, i.e. maximum profit, and what appeared to be useful for its purposes, was truth. These were therefore, in the fullness of time, the consequences of pragmatism; and yet how harmlessly, indeed how deceptively it may have also looked like ‘theory-practice’. How speciously a truth for its own sake was spurned here too, without saying that this was done on account of a lie for the sake of business. How speciously concrete too was the demand here for the probation of truth in practice, even in ‘changing’ the world. How great the falsifiability of Thesis 11 is then in the heads of scorners of intelligence and practicists. Certainly, as far as practicists in the socialist movement are concerned, in moral terms, as is self-evident, they do not have the least in common with the pragmatists; their will is pure, their intention revolutionary, their goal humanitarian. But by omitting the head here, and consequently nothing less than the whole wealth of Marxist theory together with the critical appropriation of the cultural legacy within it, there arises on the site of the ‘trial and error method’, of tinkering, of practicism, that cruel falsification of Thesis 11 which is reminiscent of pragmatism in methodological terms. Practicism which borders on pragmatism is a consequence of this falsification, one which is as always uncomprehended; but ignorance of a consequence is no protection against stultification. The practicists, with at best short-term credit for theory, especially complicated theory, create in the middle of the Marxist system of light the darkness of their own private ignorance and of the resentment which so easily goes with ignorance. Sometimes in fact not even practicism, i.e. still at least an activity, is necessary to explain such alienation from theory; since the schematism of unthinkingness also lives from its own, from inactive anti-philosophy. But it can thus refer even less to the most valuable thesis on Feuerbach; misunderstanding then becomes blasphemy. It must therefore be repeatedly emphasized: in Marx a thought is not true because it is useful, but it is useful because it is true . Lenin formulates the same idea in the pithy dictum: ‘Marx’s doctrine is all- powerful because it is true.’ And he continues: ‘It is the rightful heiress of the best that humanity produced in the nineteenth century in the shape of German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.’ And he states a few lines previously: ‘The whole genius of Marx consists in the fact that he gave answers to the questions which the progressive thinking of humanity had already posed’ (Lenin, Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism). In other words: real practice cannot take a single stride without having consulted theory economically and philosophically, a theory advancing with great strides. Thus just as there has been a lack of socialist theoreticians, the danger has always existed that contact with reality would suffer, a reality which is never to be interpreted schematically and simplistically, where practice was otherwise supposed to succeed in socialist terms. Even if these are open doors which the anti-pragmatism of the greatest practice-thinkers, greatest in that they were the most reliable truth-witnesses, holds open, they can still be closed again and again by an interested misinterpretation of Thesis 11. By one which ironically enough believes it can detect in the highest triumph of philosophy – which takes place in Thesis 11 – an abdication of philosophy, in fact a kind of non-bourgeois pragmatism. Precisely that future aspect is poorly served here which no longer comes towards us uncomprehended, but to which conversely our active knowledge comes; – Ratio keeps watch on this stretch of practice. Just as it keeps watch on every stretch of humanitarian road home: against the irrational which ultimately also shows itself in any practice devoid of concept. For if the destruction of reason sinks back into the barbaric irrational, then the ignorance of reason sinks back into the stupid irrational; though the latter does not of course shed blood, but ruins Marxism. Even banality is thus counter-revolution against Marxism itself; since Marxism is the consummation (not the Americanisation) of the most progressive thoughts of humanity.

So much for false understanding, right at the end, where it surfaces. The false equally requires elucidation precisely because Thesis 11 is the most important – corruptio optimi pessima. At the same time this thesis is the most succinctly expressed one; so a commentary here must go into the literal meaning much more than with the others. So what is the significance of the wording in Thesis 11, what is its apparent contrast between knowing and changing? There is no contrast; even the not contrary, but rather broadening particle ‘but’ is missing in Marx’s original (cf. MEGA I, 5, p. 535); there is just as little sign of an either-or. And previous philosophers are reproached for the fact – or rather: it is identified as a class barrier in them – that they have only interpreted the world in various ways, not however that they – have philosophized. But interpretation is related to contemplation and follows from it; non -contemplative knowledge is thus now distinguished as a new flag which truly carries us to victory. But as a flag of knowledge , as the same flag which Marx – though with action, not with contemplative quiet – raised above his major work of learned research. This major work is a clear directive for action, but it is called ‘Das Kapital’, not ‘Guide to Success’ or even ‘Active Propaganda'; it is not a sort of recipe for a quick heroic deed ante rem, but stands in the middle of the res, in painstaking examination, philosophizing contextual exploration of the most difficult reality. With the course set towards comprehended necessity, towards knowledge of the dialectical laws of development in nature and society as a whole. The identification of the first part of the proposition thus pushes off from the philosophers who ‘have only interpreted the world in various ways’, and from nothing else; it does set sail, but only on an extremely well thought-out voyage, as the second part of the proposition reveals: on that of a new, of an active philosophy, one which, in order to achieve change, is as inevitable as it is suitable. Undoubtedly Marx did direct harsh words against philosophy, but not against contemplative philosophy per se , whenever it was important philosophy from a great age. But precisely against a particular kind of contemplative philosophy, namely that of the Hegel epigones of his time, which was in fact a non-philosophy. Hence, characteristically, the ‘German Ideology’, which was aimed at these epigones, contains the strongest polemical attack: ‘We must set aside philosophy, we must jump out of it and, as ordinary people, apply ourselves to the study of reality, for which there is enormous material even in literature, of which philosophers are of course unaware; and if we then come across people like Kuhlmann or Stirner again, we find that we have had them ‘'behind” us and below us for a long time. Philosophy is about as similar to study of the real world as masturbation is to love-making’ (MEGA I, 5, p. 216). The names Kuhlmann (a pietistic theologian of the time) and especially Stirner show only too dearly to which address or kind of philosophy this mighty invective was directed; it was directed at philosophical windbaggery. It was not directed at Hegelian philosophy and other great philosophies of the past, no matter how contemplative these were considered to be; Marx would have been the last person to have missed a ‘study of the real world’ in the concrete philosopher Hegel, the most knowledgeable encyclopedist since Aristotle. This kind of objection was raised to Hegel by minds fundamentally different to Marx and Engels, the minds of the Prussian reaction, subsequently of revisionism and similar ‘political realists’, as we know full well. Of real previous philosophy, on the other hand, Marx speaks quite differently even in the ‘German Ideology’, namely in the sense of a creative real entry into an inheritance. Previously the ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ of 1844 had already clearly established that philosophy could not be abolished without realizing it, could not be realized without abolishing it. The former, with the accent on realization , is said for the ‘men of practice’: ‘Hence, quite rightly, the practical political faction in Germany demands the negation of philosophy . Where it is quite wrong is not in the demand but in stopping at the demand which in all seriousness it neither implements nor can achieve. It believes it can achieve that negation by turning its back on philosophy and murmuring a few irritated and banal phrases about it with its head turned away. The limitation of its field of vision does not rank philosophy as well in the precincts of German reality or imagine it even under the rubric of German practice and the theories that serve it. You demand that we should start from real living seeds , but you forget that the real living seed of the German nation has until now only proliferated beneath its skull. In a word: You cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it .’ The second, with the accent on abolition , is said for the ‘theoreticians’: ‘The same wrong, only with reverse factors, was committed by the theoretical political faction which dates from philosophy. It saw in the present struggle only the critical struggle of philosophy with the German world , it did not consider that subsequent philosophy itself belongs to this world and is its, albeit ideal, completion . Critical of its adversary, it behaved uncritically towards itself, in that it began with the assumptions of philosophy and either stuck at its given results or issued demands and results of philosophy imported from elsewhere, although these – assuming they are justified – are conversely only to be obtained through the negation of subsequent (!) philosophy , of philosophy as philosophy. We will reserve a closer portrayal of this faction for the moment’ (it occurred in the ‘Holy Family’ and in the ‘German Ideology’, with the severest critique of degenerate contemplation, of the critical ‘repose of knowing’). ‘Its basic defect can be reduced to this: It believed it could realize philosophy without abolishing it ’ (MEGA I, 1/1, p. 613). Marx thus gives both factions of the time an antidote for their behaviour, in each case a reverse medicina mentis: he imposes greater realization of philosophy on the practical men of that time, and greater abolition of philosophy on the theoreticians. However, even the ‘negation’ of philosophy (itself a very highly philosophically charged concept deriving from Hegel) refers in a most explicit way here to ‘ subsequent philosophy’, not to every possible and future philosophy in general. The ‘negation’ refers to philosophy with truth for its own sake, i.e. to autarkical-contemplative philosophy, to one which simply interprets the world in an antiquarian way, it does not refer to one which changes the world in a revolutionary way. Indeed, even inside the ‘subsequent philosophy’, which is of course so fundamentally different from the Hegel epigones, there is, despite all the contemplation, so much ‘study of the real world’ that even German classical philosophy does not figure in a totally impractical way among the ‘three sources and three components of Marxism’. The absolutely new aspect in Marxist philosophy consists in the radical changing of its basis, in its proletarian revolutionary mission; but the absolutely new aspect does not consist in the idea that the only philosophy which is capable of changing and destined to change the world concretely is not – philosophy at all any more. Because it is so like never before, hence precisely the triumph of knowledge in the second part of the proposition of Thesis 11, concerning the changing of the world; Marxism would not be a change at all in the true sense if it were no theoretical- practical primacy of true philosophy before and in it. Not least philosophy which, with staying power, with full cultural inheritance, is well-versed in ultra-violet, that is: in the future-laden properties of reality. Changing in the untrue sense is easy of course in many ways, even without a concept; the Huns also changed things, change can also be brought about through megalomania, through anarchism, even through the ravings of mental illness which Hegel calls a ‘perfect depiction of chaos’. But sound change, especially that into the realm of freedom , comes about solely through sound knowledge, with ever more precisely mastered necessity. Out and out philosophers have subsequently changed the world in this way: Marx, Engels, Lenin. Practicists from the hollow of the hand, schematists with a horde of quotations, have not changed it, and neither have those empiricists whom Engels called ‘induction asses’. Philosophical change is change with unstinting knowledge of its context; for if philosophy does not represent a separate science above all other sciences, it certainly is the separate knowledge and conscience of this Totum in all sciences. It is the progressive consciousness of the progressive Totum, since the Totum does not itself stand as a Factum, but solely circulates with the still Unbecome in the gigantic context of Becoming. Philosophical change is thus a change according to the stipulations of the analysed situation, of dialectical tendency, of objective laws, of real possibility. That is why therefore in the end philosophical change takes place essentially in the horizon of the future, which is generally incapable of contemplation, incapable of interpretation, but is discernible in a Marxist sense. And seen from this point of view, Marx also rose above the changing accents, cited above, which are only placed antithetically: concerning realization or abolition of philosophy (realization accentuated against the ‘men of practice’, abolition accentuated against the ‘theoreticians’).

The dialectical unity of correctly understood accents reads, at the end of the already quoted ‘Introduction’ (MEGA I, 1/1, p. 621), as is well-known: ‘Philosophy cannot realize itself without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot abolish itself without the realization of philosophy.’ And the abolition of the proletariat, as soon as it is not only grasped as a class, but equally, as Marx teaches, as the sharpest symptom of human self- alienation, is undoubtedly a long act: a total abolition of this kind coincides with the final act of communism. In the sense in which Marx expresses it in the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, with a perspective which is at home precisely in the philosophically most extreme ‘Eschaton’: ‘Only here for him (for man) has his natural existence become his human existence and nature for him become man. Thus society is the perfect essential unity of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 116). The final perspective of changing the world which Marx attempted to formulate shines here. Its thought (the knowledge- conscience of all practice, in which the still distant Totum is mirrored) undoubtedly demands just as much newness of philosophy, as it creates resurrection of nature.

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From the Classics: Marx and the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

Posted by MLT Editors | Oct 9, 2023 | From the Classics | 0

Karl Marx and His Eleven Theses On Feuerbach , 1845

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) was a leading German materialist philosopher and critic of Christianity. He was admired by young Marx and Engels. In these eleven short notes on Feuerbach’s philosophy Marx shows he has broken free of Feuerbach’s limitations and the limitations of the Young Hegelians. These notes represent an important step on the road to dialectical and historical materialism.  They were not published until 1888 five years after Marx’s death. The Eleventh Thesis is the most memorable and the most often quoted. -The Editors

I The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity , he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity. II The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. III The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice . IV Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice. V Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity. VI Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals. VII Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society. VIII All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. IX The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society. X The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity. XI The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

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