F R E D E R I C L. B E N D E R

M A R X , M A T E R I A L I S M AND THE LIMITS OF P H I L O S O P H Y

In creating 'orthodox' Marxism in the 1880s and 1890s, Friedrich Engels and his chief disciples, G. V. Plekhanov, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, formulated certain philosophical presuppositions which together constitute both an ontological and an epistemological materialism, that is, the claims that all existing things are comprised of matter in its various forms or combinations and that all such material things exist independently of human cognition, respectively. Both the orthodox and their non-Marxist opponents typically allege that this set of philosophical claims accurately represents the views not only of Engels and his successors, but of Marx as well, to whom is usually attributed the founding of orthodox Marxism itself. Since the publication of Georg Lukhcs' History and Class Consciousness (1923), however, there has been growing criticism of this attribution to Marx of orthodoxy in philosophical (as well as practical) matters, although the controversy is by no means fully resolved today. At times it would even appear that the dogmatism of the orthodox is matched by an opposed dogmatism of those for whom Marx's anti-materialism is beyond question. One of the purposes of this article is to ascertain the sense(s) - and the rather limited extent - to which Marx's views on ontological and epistemological questions might properly be regarded as materialist, and to examine the somewhat 'Spinozist' (in my terminology: 'non-dualist') ontology which he held in the mid-1840s and then abandoned in favor of the cluster of non-ontological notions which posterity has termed 'historical materialism'. There have been many consequences of the attribution of ontological and epistemological materialism to Marx. Among these have been (1) the ease with which Marx's method of socio-historical analysis ('historical materialism') has been assumed to be deterministic, reductionistic (as so-called 'economic materialism'), and ultimately 'scientific' in a sense not inconsistent with a Darwinian conception of nature (all of which Marx's texts concerning historical materialism may or may not sustain); (2) the ease with which the orthodox have disassociated Marx from Hegel and replaced his dialectical method with an allegedly scientific ontology called 'dialectical materialism'; Studies in Soviet Thought 25 (1983) 79-100. 0039-3797/83/0252-0079 $02.20. Copyright © 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A.

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and (3) the elevation of dialectical materialism, as first philosophy, to a theoretical priority over the socio-historical analyses of historical materialism, such that the connection between historical-materialist social research and the constantly changing needs of a revolutionary proletariat is severed and replaced with an assumed deduction of historical materialism from dialectical materialism. In consequence, historical materialism has almost entirely ceased to be the flexible tool for guiding revolutionary praxis Marx intended it to be and become instead a metaphysically-derived dogma, the effect of which is to stifle the creative mutual adaptation of theory and prams necessary for successful revolutionary prams as envisaged by Marx. In the past two decades or so, following the widespread dissemination of Marx's early writings in their entirety, evidence has accumulated that whatever the philosophical claims of the late Engels and the orthodox, Marx himself was not a philosophical materialist. That is, Marx would now appear to have espoused neither ontological nor epistemological materialism as defined above. In what follows, the evolution of Marx's views concerning philosophical materialism is examined in detail and it is shown that his ontological pronouncements, which are concentrated in the major works of the mid-1840s (including some written in collaboration with Engels), constitute not a materialist ontology, but, first, an abortive attempt at developing a rudimentary non-dualist one, and, second, an attempted repudiation of philosophy altogether. Marx's comments during this period show him to have been highly critical of what he took to be materialism's one-sidedness. This, taken in conjunction with the complementary one-sidedness of idealism, was said to point to a truth underlying both perspectives, which Marx called "naturalism-humanism" (stage one). Marx, however, never developed the philosophical implications of this viewpoint, abandoning philosophical speculation soon thereafter and turning to the development of the complex of socio-historical ideas subsequently to become known as historical materialism, conceived of as an anti-philosophy, as well as to active involvement in the revolutionary movements of the mid- to late-1840s (stage two). It will be shown that not only did Marx reject philosophical materialism (materialist ontology and epistemology) in 1844-45, but that by late 1845, while working with Engels on The German Ideology, he repudiated philosophy entirely, including, apparently, his own earlier naturalism-humanism. I shall show that naturalism-humanism and philosophical materialism are incompatible and that each

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is inconsistent with Marx's historical materialism. I shall also suggest that, although Marx lacked adequate grounds upon which to so repudiate philosophy, the subsequent development of an 'orthodox' Marxist philosophy in the 1880s was based upon a serious misunderstanding of the significance of historical materialism, Marx's emerging anti-philosophy of the mid- to late-1840s.

I. MARX'S REPUDIATION OF ONTOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL MATERIALISM It is well-known that Marx was a consistent opponent of idealist metaphysics. It is perhaps not nearly as well-known that he was equally opposed to (ontological) materialism. It can be seen from even a cursory examination of Marx's major texts that historical materialism is not a metaphysics at all; it in no way attempts to answer such ontological questions as "Is reality ultimately material or mental?" or such related epistemological questions as "Are mental phenomena reducible to material causes?" In fact, in Marx's hands at least, historical materialism is decidely anti-metaphysical; it dismisses such questions as in principle incapable of being decided theoretically and as irrelevant to revolutionary praxis. Indeed, in the Summer of 1844 (in the so-called 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'), in late 1844 (in The Holy Family), and in the Spring of 1845 (in the 'Theses on Feuerbach') - that is, even before beginning The German Ideology, in which historical materialism is presented for the first time - Marx had already distinguished his emerging outlook from that of ontological materialism (as well as, of course, from idealism). In the first of these texts, Marx attempts to define his position as a 'naturalism or humanism' which grasps the truth which both idealism and materialism express imperfectly from their respective one-sided perspectives: "a consistent naturalism or humanism is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, and at the same time is the unifying truth of both".t Significantly, this claim is followed immediately by another, which foreshadows the emergence of historical materialism itself: "we also see how only naturalism is able to comprehend the act of world history" .2 This identity of naturalism and humanism points to Marx's related view, that man, society, and nature form a unity:

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The human essence of nature primarily exists only for social man, because only here is nature a link (Band) with man . . . . as the fife-element of human actuality - only here is nature the foundation of man's own human existence . . . . Thus society is the completed, essential unity (vollendete Wesenseinheit) of man with nature.., the fulfilled naturalism of man and humanism of nature .3 Because this naturalism is said to be the equivalent o f h u m a n i s m , we must distinguish it f r o m naturalism simpliciter, the r e d u c t i o n o f m a n and h u m a n experience to a collection o f u n m e d i a t e d natural or physical processes. This distinction is true to Marx's position, as can be seen f r o m b o t h his c o n c e p t i o n o f the unity o f m a n and nature, above, and his view that the h u m a n senses, unlike t h o s e o f animals, are n o t mere natural mechanisms but the p r o d u c t s o f historical and social d e v e l o p m e n t . Thus, contrasting real, social m e n w i t h the abstract c o n c e p t o f unsocialized ' h u m a n n a t u r e ' or ' m a n ' as he might have existed in a h y p o t h e t i c a l 'state-of-nature', Marx writes: the senses of social man differ from those of the unsocial. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature is the wealth of the subjective human sensibility either cultivated or created - a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human satisfaction . . . . The development of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world .4 This critique o f the naturalistic understanding o f man is reiterated in even stronger terms in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels explicitly reject F e u e r b a c h ' s materialist view o f the alleged priority o f nature-in-itself over man. Such a view, in their opinion, fails to take a c c o u n t o f nature's d e v e l o p m e n t , as well as that o f h u m a n capacities, t h r o u g h social prams. T h a t is, Marx and Engels view nature through the category ofpraxis, n o t the o t h e r w a y around, as naturalists m u s t : this continuous sensuous working and creating, this production, (is) the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists . . . . Of course, the priority of external nature remains, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca (men who allegedly have undergone no historical development through praxis). But this differentiation (of nature "in itself" and nature "for man") has meaning only insofar as man is considered distinct from nature. And after all, the kind of nature that preceded human history i s . . . the nature which no longer exists anywhere. 5 Simply put, F e u e r b a c h " n e v e r manages to view the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity o f the individuals c o m p o s i n g i t " . 6 In The Holy Family Marx argues that ontological materialism is onesided because it is based on a purely mechanistic ( m a t h e m a t i c a l ) a c c o u n t

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of motion. That is, ontological materialism is a species of naturalism as criticized above. Ontological materialism is 'misanthropic', i.e., opposed to humanism-naturalism, in the sense that (as a theory) it replaces the unity of man and nature by a dichotomy of a subject (the human body) and a world of mechanically interacting objects. 7 In the 'Theses on Feuerbach', Marx elaborates the epistemological consequences of this theme on the grounds that such materialism conceives reality "only in the form of the object" as it were standing over and against a subject who is assumed to be passively subject to that object's influence by means of some form of'sense data'. Because this view wrongfully reduces man to a passive observer of objects, idealism, according to Marx, rightfully compensates for this onesidedness by developing the 'active side' of the man-world relationship. But idealism does this only at the cost of replacing the account of man's most fundamental interchange with nature through labor with an illusory account of a consciousness (mind or spirit) which 'creates' its objects. At its most fundamental, the error of ontological materialism and idealism alike is that they conceive the man-world (man-nature) relation dualistically, merely viewing this dualism from opposite sides. The reason for this lies in the epistemological biases of both approaches: materialism and idealism see this as a dualism which is given primordially in cognition, i.e., as a subjectobject dualism. In Marx's own view, on the other hand, such a cognitive dualism exists only consequent rather than precedent to praxis. That is, Marx views this dualism as the product of abstraction from the postulated man-society-nature unity. Contrary to the view that Marx altered his view of the relation of cognition to praxis, he apparently retained this conception of the primacy of praxis over cognition to the end of his career. Thus, in the 'Marginal Notes to Adolph Wagner's Lehrbuch der politischen Okonomie' ( 1 8 7 9 - 8 0 ) , he writes: For the doctrinaire professor (Wagner), man's relation to nature is from the beginning not practical, i.e., based on action, but theoretical . . . . But men do not begin by standing "in this theoretical relation with the objects of the external world". Like all animals they begin by eating, drinking, etc., i.e., they do not stand in any relation, but are engaged in activity, appropriate certain objects of the external world by means of their actions, and in this way satisfy their needs (i.e., they begin with production). 8 This view, that the unity of man and nature is primary and grounded in praxis, contrasts directly with the conceptual separation of man and

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nature in classical modern philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, and their successors through Kant). Further, Marx sees this separation of subject and object in modern philosophy as the result of a historical development culminating in the alienation of man from nature under the conditions of capitalist production. This can be seen in an analogy he draws in 1857 between the ontologically primordial symbiotic relationship of man to nature and the relation of an organism to the nourishment upon which it depends for its existence (its so-called 'inorganic conditions'), which he then contrasts with the actual separation of man and nature in capitalist production, which is reflected in modern philosophy: It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature (production), and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital. 9 It is important to note that Marx's denial of the adequacy of ontological materialism and idealism (and of the dualism they presuppose) is not a denial that there nonetheless existed a relation between the mechanistic materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the subsequent development of socialism/communism (these terms are interchangeable for Marx until 1847) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. In one place Marx even calls this sort of materialism "the teaching of real humanism and the logical basis of communism", 1° which seems to imply that he endorses such mechanistic ontological materialism. For example, Marx credits Helvetius with relating materialism directly to social life by stressing the importance of man's sensory qualities, enjoyment and interest; the unity of the progress o f reason with progress of industry; the natural goodness of man; etc. Also mentioned in this context is Helvetius' belief in the omnipotence of education, perhaps that idea of Enlightenment materialism which was most important for the development ofpre-Marxian socialism (Owen, Saint-Simon). Marx summarizes the early communists' thesis concerning the determining effect of the environment upon man and points out its chief consequence for social theory, as follows: If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in

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such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man . . . . If man is shaped by (the) environment, his environment must be made h u m a n . 11 This passage on Helvetius (and similar ones concerning Lamettrie, Holbach and Bentham) would make it appear that Marx would have had no objection to such environmental determinism; yet it must be noted that he does not endorse such an ontology as his own. Rather, he notes in his discussion o f the Enlightenment materialists only that they stood opposed to idealism and to conservative or reactionary social theories. That is, Marx sees these thinkers as having been progressive in their time; but this is not to say that he himself adopts their views in his own time. I would suggest that this was the case for the simple reason that Marx was thoroughly immersed in Hegelian philosophy and knew the limitations of any such unmediated theory o f social change (e.g., environmental determinism). Furthermore, in the Communist Manifesto Marx explicitly repudiates the seventeenth and eighteenth century materialists for espousing theories which could give rise to

only the 'critical-utopian socialism' of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. This, to Marx, was a socialism indeed critical o f the emerging capitalist order but at the same time utopian in that it t o o k no notice o f the class dynamics o f capitalism, i.e., the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. 12 Thus we cannot interpret Marx's qualified praise for Enlightenment materialism (relative to idealism) in The Holy Family as indicative o f his own ontological position ?3 Indeed, even in The Holy Family, Marx is acutely aware o f the political defects of the environmental determinism o f these Enlightenment thinkers and o f the early nineteenth-century socialists and communists whom they influenced. Typical o f his attitude is this other comment on Helvetius: As, according to Helvetius, it is education, by which he means not only education in the ordinary sense but the totality of the individual's conditions of life, which forms man, if a reform is necessary to abolish the contradiction between particular interests and those of society, so, on the other hand, a transformation of consciousness is necessary to carry out such a reform. 14 What is this 'transformation o f consciousness'? Is it just the consciousness of those undergoing the 'education' which is to be transformed? In the third 'Thesis on Feuerbach' Marx points out the political implications of the doctrine concerning the changing of society and consciousness:

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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 praxis. 15 That is, Marx holds that modern (post-Baconian) materialism's commitment to the view that the individual is a tabula rasa acted upon by his environment exemplifies naturalism's assumed separation of man and nature, which in turn implies, as a social philosophy, the elitist demand that these 'circumstances' be changed in order to improve the lot of mankind. But Marx repudiates this elitist consequence in the name of proletarian revolutionary prams. To Marx, the reason such a dualism of man and environment logically entails an elitist view of political action, is that someone (or some group) must have the power to change the circumstances for the benefit of the others. Thus, mechanistic materialism, whether implying reformist tinkering or radical restructuring of social 'circumstances', in either case "must divide society into two parts - one of which is superior to the other (the rest of society)". For this reason, Marx avers that changes in 'circumstances' and individuals (the latter of which he calls here "human activity or self-change") must be brought about simultaneously or dialectically (it is not clear which) and this can be accomplished only through "revolutionary praxis". That is, Marx gives the mechanistic materialist social theorists (and their communist/socialist followers) credit for their historical contribution to the development of communist thought. But he endorses neither their social theory (because of its elitism), nor their anthropology (because of its unmediated naturalism), nor their ontology (which stresses only one side, even if in the period of the rise of the bourgeoisie it happened to be the more progressive side, of the materialism-idealism antinomy). Since, for Marx, this antinomy is purely a matter of theory, not praxis, taking either side of it is pejoratively 'metaphysical' and irrelevant to the actual movement of the proletariat to transform society along communist lines. For this reason, he brands even the radical-sounding materialism of the "critical-utopian socialists" as "bourgeois": "the standpoint of the old (philosophical) materialism is (bourgoeis) civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or socialized humanity (communism)." 16 Ontological materialism's (indeed, naturalism's) theoretical failings, and its consequent elitism in prams, are

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the result of its inability to take into account the class dynamics of society. But we are left wondering whether Marx's own rudimentary non-dualistic ontology, 'naturalism-humanism', is not equally 'metaphysical' and 'bourgeois' for the same reason. Let us summarize thus far. Marx has posited a primordial unity of man, society, and nature, interpreting bourgeois society as alienating man from this unity. This alienation is reflected both in capitalist social relations and in modern philosophy (in its idealist, materialist and dualist variations). Marx would appear, on the other hand, to have embraced a monistic or nondualistic ontology, 'naturalism-humanism', which would be neither idealist, materialist, nor dualist. But one implication of Marx's characterization of social environmentalism as inherently elitist is that philosophy as such is irrelevant to the standpoint of the proletariat. Marx, be it noted, has also embarked upon a search for a theory suited to the practical transformation of the social world from the standpoint of the proletariat. This, as we shall soon see, brings him to the thesis that metaphysics is inherently irrelevant to revolutionary praxis and must, therefore, be replaced by a social theory (perhaps still non-dualistic) properly suited for reflecting the requirements of such a revolutionary praxis and capable of aiding this transformation. But this repudiation of metaphysics, indeed of philosophy altogether, implies the repudiation of Marx's own naturalism-humanism as well. It is this transition of Marx's outlook from naturalism-humanism to social theory (historical materialism) that we shall follow in the next section.

II. THE ORIGINS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND MARX'S REPUDIATION OF PHILOSOPHY What then is this 'new materialism', which is not a materialist ontology, sought by Marx (and Engels)? In The German Ideology Marx and Engels concentrate on social-historical-political questions such as "What are the fundamental structures of society?" and "How do these influence historical change and, particularly, the formation of ideologies?" rather than on ontological or epistemological ones. They argue that the most fundamental basis of human existence (history) is that certain 'material' human needs give rise to social production, such that social life in general depends in the last analysis on the class dynamics generated in the material process of production necessary to meet these needs. They then proceed to analyse

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history and social structures on the basis of such class-relations in such a way as to provide the proletariat with an intellectual framework adequate to carry out analyses of its social-political situation and guide it in its struggle against the bourgeoisie. This is the practical payoff of social theory (historical materialism) which no ontological materialism could provide since, as a naturalism, ontological materialism inherently lacks concepts of such socio-historical mediation, i.e., concepts of class structure and social relations. The repudiation of ontological materialism and idealism is now for Marx only one component of a repudiation of philosophy in general. It is not only naturalism, but philosophy in general, which is now seen by Marx as incapable of comprehending concrete social mediations. All philosophy, including ontological and epistemological materialism and Marx's own earlier non-dualistic naturalism-humanism, is rejected because of the limitations of philosophy's purely theorizing activity itself; in other words, Marx now seeks to ground practical understanding on social activity (labor, class struggle and immanent revolution), thereby allegedly dissolving all the old philosophical antinomies: "It is apparent how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity lose their opposition and their existence as antitheses only in the social situation. ''17 This comment, incidentally, is followed immediately by a clause which for some unknown reason was subsequently crossed out in the manuscript: it is apparent how the resolution of theoretical antitheses is possible only in a practical way, only through man's practical energy, and hence their resolution is in no way merely a problem of knowledge but a real problem of life which philosophy could not solve because it grasped the problem as only theoretical. 18 But lest we think that Marx did not continue to believe that (revolutionary) praxis could resolve these antinomies, let us note that this same thought is nonetheless restated, and thus presumably not abandoned, in the 'Theses on Feuerbach': All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human praxis and the comprehension of this praxis . . . . The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it. 19

Indeed, communism itself is defined in the manuscripts of 1844 precisely in terms of the overcoming of all the traditional antinomies:

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Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species.2° Let us bypass the problem of making sense of the concept of communism in terms of resolving these antinomies in practice rather than in theory. The point is that Marx so indicts philosophy because philosophy is now seen as mere theory irrelevant to social transformation. And this, of course, must implicate Marx's own earlier attempt to stake out a non-dualistic ontological position. Marx thus emerges in the 'Theses on Feuerbach' and The German Ideology as an anti-philosopher, proclaiming two theses about philosophy: (1) that it is irrelevant to the project of world-transformation; and, consequently, (2) that indulging in philosophical activity is implicitly conservative. The German Ideology is, of course, a polemical tract directed against the young-Hegelians' "idealist view of history" which, it is claimed; "in every period looks for a category" with which to explain history. Marx and Engels' point is that no such abstract category - presumably, even the eighteenth-century French and English materialists' "matter in motion" or their utopian followers' social environmentalism - can "remain constantly on the real ground of history", zl The central difficulty of all such interpretations of history in terms of an a priori idea ('category') is that it is irrelevant to "material practice". Marx and Engels indict their former teachers and colleagues, the Young-Hegelians, with epitomizing the alleged failure of philosophy as mere phrasemongering: The Young-Hegelian ideologists are the staunchest conservatives, despite their allegedly "world-shaking" statements. The most recent among them have found the correct expression for their doings in saying they are fighting only against "phrases". They forget, however, that they fight them only with phrases of their own. In no way are they attacking the actual existing world; they merely attack the phrases of this world .22 For Marx and Engels, these seemingly radical philosophers forget what most philosophers never even notice: that "not criticism but revolution is the driving force (treibende Kraft) o f history and also of religion, philosophy, and all other types of t h e o r y " Y This charge, incidentally, serves as a foil for claiming the uniqueness of their own approach to the study of history: historical materialism is to be an interpretation o f history in terms of revolution,

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and revolution is seen as the real 'driving force' of historical change. Thus, we hold that Marx and Engels could not have been interested in elaborating such a categofial interpretation of history (let alone a philosophy), except as the latter might provide a framework for practical (revolutionary) analyses. Nor, despite generations of orthodox 'Marxist' misunderstanding, could they have been interested in dogmatically reducing the legal-political-ideological 'superstructure' of society to its allegedly economic 'basis', for such a dogmatic philosophy of history could be of no conceivable service to a revolutionary class (the proletariat) which, on the contrary, requires flexible tools for the comprehension of the social, economic and political forces arrayed against it. Historical materialism, at least in the hands of Marx, is, then, not a dogma about history but above all a guide to the comprehension of the proletariat's prospects for revolution, in which class struggle is seen as the decisive factor in social change. Indeed, for Marx, historical (social) analysis is political (class) analysis.

III. MARX'S NEW (NON-PHILOSOPHICAL) "MATERIALISM" We are now in a position to appreciate the non-ontological sense in which Marx and Engels call their new viewpoint 'materialist', for we note that they present their view of history and society precisely by distinguishing it from what they term 'philosophical' or 'idealist' conceptions, each of which takes as its point of departure some notion of nature or of human nature. Marx and Engels declare that the premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity .24 In all known historical cases, some sort of production, hence some sort of labor, has been necessary for the social group to survive and reproduce itself. Marx and Engels designate as "material" not only certain of the conditions under which real (socialized) individuals live, but also those needs such as food, clothing, etc. without the satisfaction of which such societal survival would be impossible: life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy

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these needs, the production of material life itself . . . . In any conception of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance . . . . 2s The necessity of meeting these 'material' needs as they are mediated historically, and their increase, imposes upon any society the necessity (Marx and Engels' 'first historical act') of production. It is important to identify further this formulation of the central role of the concept of material human needs, as the bare listing of eating and drinking, etc. may lead to the impression that Marx and Engels regard such needs as ontologically fixed or historically unchanging. Rather, needs are said to undergo a development which, in turn, is one of the primary bases of further historical change. Historically~existing needs are themselves the products of the satisfaction of previously-existing needs, and thus the needs of a modern individual will be quite different from those of, say, a citizen of an ancient Greek city state. As Marx and Engels put it: "once a need is satisfied . . . new needs arise. The production of new needs is (also) the first historical act. ''26 That is, the production of new needs is also one of the necessary conditions of social existence (history). And, in speaking a few pages further on of the "aspects of the primary historical relationships", all of which are said to increase in the course of history, Marx and Engels list productivity, population, the division of labor, and needs .27 The explicit designation of these four as the primary aspects of historical change, especially the role played therein by material production to meet material needs, should dispel any notion that Marx and Engels propose an ontological materialism as the conceptual basis of their interpretation of history. Despite the repudiation of philosophy, however, historical materialism can be said to be 'materialist' in the sense that its central concept is that of praxis and its results (labor, production, political action and change, etc.). But we must be careful in the self-interpretation of historical materialism that we attribute to its authors. Marx apparently never used either of the terms "historical materialism" or "materialist interpretation (or conception) of history". 28 Engels' later use of the designation "materialist conception (or interpretation) of history" is apparently only a convenient device by which to place Marx's and his approach in opposition to the philosophical view of history of the Young-Hegelians (and other philosophers). But because of Marx and Engels' desire also to oppose the Young-Hegelians' philosophical idealism, in the later Engels' hands historical materialism acquires the

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connotation of being itself a philosophical (ontological and epistemological)

materialism, despite Marx's decisive repudiation of philosophy four decades earlier. The social-historical, rather than philosophical, sense of the term 'materialism' in Marx's historical materialism can be demonstrated by documenting the central role accorded to 'material' production (not "matter in motion') in the theory. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels allege that material production is always necessary for the existence of society, although, of course, it acquires its specific form in each case according to the natural and social conditions confronting the society in question : each stage contains a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of pioductive forces, capital funds and circumstances, which on the one hand is indeed modified by the new generation, but on the other also prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development and a special character.29 The sum of available productive forces and the particular ways they are put to use determines the specific way in which production takes place. This, in turn, is responsible for the historical characteristics of individuals within the society. What people, in a given society, are, according to Marx and Engels, "coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The (social) nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their (social) production. ''3° Thus, it can be said that "circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances" .31 It is perhaps worthwhile to dwell a few moments on the words 'just as much' in this last passage. Here, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels were criticizing the Young-Hegelians' idealist views of history, in which 'man' was conceived as a spiritual being who, by acting upon nature, creates society and history simply as 'he' wills. Although they are quite well aware that men are indeed active, social beings, and thereby 'make circumstances'. Marx and Engels are at pains in this book to emphasize against the Young-Hegelians' "idealist view of history" that, in the interaction o f men and nature which occurs when men engage in material production, circumstances also 'make men'. Thus, for Marx and Engels, there is no fixed human essence ('man') and their conception of history is eo ipso opposed to all philosophical conceptions of history, i.e., conceptions which assume some notion of a fixed

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human nature. Human existence, which, for Marx and Engels, is always mediated by historical and social conditions (this is the one 'essential' human characteristic they do assume), is always fundamentally the practical interaction of (social) men (and women, of course) and nature, as mediated by historically-given natural and social conditions. History is neither (a) the idealists' 'self-creation' of mankind through consciousness nor sheer will (because there are always natural and social conditions limiting human action); nor (2) the philosophical materialists' determinism by external natural forces (which, according to Marx and Engels, are always mediated historically); nor, incidentally, (3) an 'economic determinism' based upon autonomous economic forces, e.g., geographical situation, natural resources, changes in productive technology (because the environment, production and the means of production are continually being modified by the decisions and actions of already socialized, historical men in definite class relations with one another). The arguments of The German Ideology are primarily directed against (1). With respect to (2), in addition to the repudiation of ontological materialism in The Holy Family and the 'Theses on Feuerbach', we have seen Marx argue in the 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' that natural objects are never presented in human sense-experience except through the mediation of the historical and social modifications ('genesis') of actual human beings. Mechanistic natural determinism is specifically ruled out out in the passage which states: "But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself, and fixedly isolated from man, is nothing for man". 32 Concerning (3), matters are somewhat more complex. Although it is possible to read certain of Marx's texts, notably the 'Preface' to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), as expressing economic determinism (the reduction of all concrete social life to economic causes), other texts militate against so simplistic a view. This question must be explored in detail elsewhere, with specific reference to this 'Preface' and to those of Engels' later letters in which such economic determinism is repudiated in his own and Marx's names.

IV. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS It must be admitted that Marx's 'solution' to the problem of the philosophical antinomy of materialism vs. idealism is hardly satisfactory. Although it might be possible to develop further the earlier insights of 'naturalism-humanism',

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what can it possibly mean to say that "subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity lose their opposition and existence as antitheses only in the social situation"? Although there may be some truth to the accusation that philosophers have contributed little to transforming the world (in the direction of communism, of course), this does not mean that philosophical problems are meaningless - unless, that is, one has a remarkably narrow conception of meaning. In the transition from naturalismhumanism to historical materialism, Marx has, in fact, chosen simply to ignore the theoretical problem posed by traditional ontology and its antinomies. He ceased to concem himself much with philosophical (as distinct from historical) materialism after 1845. Yet on numerous occasions he expressed preference for materialism over idealism because the former identified itself with the rising bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whereas the latter identified itself with the bourgeoisie's reactionary opponents. But we must not assume that this preference overshadows Marx's more self-consistent view that "the standpoint of the old materialism is (bourgeois) civil society" whereas "the standpoint of the new (materialism) is human society or social humanity", i.e., communism. This passage, after all, suggests that the "new materialism" which Marx favors is historical materialism, not any new version of the 'old', i.e., philosophical materialism. But what can it mean to claim that historical materialism is not, nor has any, 'metaphysics'? Even if it is not itself a metaphysical system, historical materialism contains certain basic assumptions about man, society, labor, production and nature, which themselves rest upon assumptions about "the way things (really) are" with respect to what is denoted by these terms - and this, of course, is 'metaphysics'. Although it would take us too far afield to explore all the relevant subtleties and ramifications of Marx's views on these issues, clearly his modified appropriation of Hegel's dialectic, his belief in the underlying rationality of history, and the role therein of class consciousness and action, reveal an unarticulated 'metaphysics' in the two senses of 'basic presuppositions' and 'view of reality'. But, of course, an unarticulated metaphysics is hardly no metaphysics at all. It is arguable that Marx never did make the total break with his philosophical past which he (and Engels) believed themselves to have expressed in The German Ideology. 33 And this for the reason that no serious thinker can do without metaphysics in the two senses just mentioned. For this reason, the formulations of the allegedly ('metaphysical')concept of alienated labor 34 in the

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1844 Manuscripts retain their relevance to the works of 1845 and beyond - as can be verified by a close reading of the Grundrisse and Capital. 3s Seen in this light, the origins of 'orthodox' Marxist philosophy reveal a serious failure to understand Marx's intent as anti-philosopher, whatever the ultimate shortcomings of his attempt to escape philosophy altogether. Despite the orthodox, it is clear that Marx, quite simply, was not a philosophical materialist. Nonetheless, Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888), declares philosophy to be eternally divided between the "two great camps" of materialism and idealism, and affirms that Marxism belongs to the former .36 In this context, Marx's apparent approval of Engels' Anti-Diihring (1878) is often cited against the thesis defended in this article. As Engels points out in his preface to the second edition of Anti-Diihring, written two years after Marx's death in 1883, he had read Marx the entire manuscript of the first edition before sending it to the printer. In the absence of anything in the Marx-Engels correspondence indicating Marx's disagreement with Engels, is it not unreasonable to assume that Marx had approved the text of Anti-Diihring, including its naturalistic outlook? This absence of direct evidence indicating Marx's disagreement with Engels' naturalism is then taken as evidence that Engels' philosophical materialism was acceptable to Marx. Moreoever, it is often suggested that Engels merely expresses explicitly the naturalistic viewpoint shared by both men. But, as we have seen, naturalism is inconsistent with historical materialism. If Marx, in his last years, decided to adopt a naturalistic outlook, presumably there would be evidence of it in his writings. But the passage cited earlier from the Wagner-critique, written in the same year Anti-Diihring was pubfished, demonstrates that Marx continued to reject naturalism in his last years. This, I think, should be sufficient to refute the claim that Marx's silence about the Anti-Diihring indicates acceptance of Engels' naturalism and/or philosophical materialism. Specifically, what Engels refers to in the preface to the second edition of Anti-Diihring, is the "conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist". 37 Now, there is nothing about the alleged dialectical character of the laws of nature that I think would have offended Marx. Marx presumably would have had no difficulty assenting to the claim that "(modern materialism) is essentially dialectic(al) and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences") s Indeed, this is precisely the point of the so-called modern materialism Marx espoused as far back

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as the 'Theses on Feuerbach': modern, i.e., historical, materialism, the outlook shared from then on by Marx and Engels, needs no philosophical (ontological, epistemological, ethical, etc.) complement or basis. That is, the Anti-Diihring's pronouncements on dialectics probably do reflect Marx's own conception of historical materialism. But Engels, writing after Marx's death in 1888, and therefore without his advance approval, alters Marx's anti-philosophical standpoint, which he had represented more or less accurately in Anti-Dfihring, by placing their anti-philosophical historical materialism into the 'camp' of philosophical materialism. Marx would I think also not have quarrelled with the view expressed in Anti-Diihring that in nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events.., the laws which Hegel first developed in all-embracing but mystical form.39 For this reason it is probably true that Marx accepted the view expounded by Engels that natural science was discovering dialectical laws at work in nature. But Marx's position on dialectics must be kept conceptually distinct from his position concerning ontological materialism. There is nothing in the alleged dialectical character of natural and social laws to indicate that Marx accepted an ontological materialist foundation, a naturalistic and philosophical foundation, for historical materialism. Indeed, to have done so would have been to compromise what seems to have been, in Marx's eyes, historical materialism's main achievement: its emancipation from philosophy. Engels' later dialectical materialism departs from Marx's anti-philosophy on the following major points: (1) Whereas Marx understood historical materialism to be the supersession of philosophy, and therefore rather scrupulously abstained from making ontological pronouncements, Engels argued that "being" is "material" and is "active" in relation to "consciousness", the merely passive "reflection of being". 4° (2) Whereas Marx had criticized traditional materialism for its assuming the orientation of the isolated individual standing mutely "in awe of'' (or "comprehending")the world, Engels defines the subject matter of the philosophy he espouses as the study of "pieces of matter . . . . in motion". 41 That is, what for Marx was at most an implicit ontological 'realism', the belief in the existence of real objects, is transformed by Engels into an ontological materialism, the belief that these real objects are material in the physical sense. It should be stressed that from Engels onward, the distinction between ontological

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realism and materialism is regarded as specious by orthodox Marxists, on the grounds of Engels' division of all of philosophy into only two 'camps', that of materialism and that of idealism. Marx, as well as Engels, is then of course placed in the former. (3) Whereas Marx had drawn most of his intellectual inspiration from Hegel, the classical political economists and his study of history, Engels, at least in the latter portion of his career, assimilated 'materialist dialectics' to the natural sciences (primarily physics, chemistry and biology), with no consideration for the distinction implicit in Hegel between the natural sciences and the 'sciences of man' (Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissensehaften). Marx, of course, had striven to transcend the distinction of these two kinds of science in his early 'naturalism-humanism': History itself is a real part of natural history, of the development of nature into man. Natural science will one day incorporate the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate natural science: there will be a single science.42 To the extent that historical materialism can be seen as the fulfillment of the program of naturalism-humanism, Marx's historical materialism cannot be assimilated to either type of science alone any more than it can be assimilated to either of the two philosophical 'camps'. In overlooking these subtleties; in believing that dialectical materialism possessed the formal laws of a deterministic universe which were being corroborated by the advances of the natural sciences of his day; and in believing that the latter established the ontological materialist basis of historical materialism, Engels laid the groundwork for the subsequent orthodox claim of the deducibility of historical materialism from dialectical materialism.43 It was Plekhanov who, in 1891, first labelled Engels' naturalism 'dialectical materialism' and argued that historical materialism is rooted in dialectical materialism. 44 Such dialectical materialism, ironically, does attempt to combine the 'active side' of spirit and the 'facticity' of matter. But it does not and cannot transcend the distinction between matter and spirit which Marx called for in the 'Theses on Feuerbach'. It should also be noted that dialectical-materialist metaphysics is only a one-sided, theoretical way to try to overcome the materialism4dealism antinomy, for which reason it is quite out of keeping with Marx's repudiation of philosophy in the name of a social theory based upon the concept ofpraxis. Yet Engels and Plekhanov thereby forced Marxist philosophy into one of the two great metaphysical 'camps', bequeathing to the world the 'orthodox' dogma that Marx was a philosophical

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materialist, despite the clear evidence o f Marx's texts. A l t h o u g h such purely theoretical concerns are o f o n l y potential utility for world-transforming praxis, surely any n e w Marxism must include on its agenda a critical con-

f r o n t a t i o n w i t h o r t h o d o x y and a return " t o the things t h e m s e l v e s " , i.e., to a praxis u n d i s t o r t e d b y o r t h o d o x y and capable o f giving rise to, and being guided b y , a t h e o r y valid for present conditions. The critical study o f Marx's texts is perhaps one place to begin developing such a theory. University o f H a w a i i

NOTES 1 Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels Historische-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Glashi~tten, Auvermann, 1970 (hereafter MEGA), 113, p. 160. English translation in Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, Writings o f the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City, Doubleday, 1967 (hereafter E&G), p. 325. 2 MEGA I/3,p. 160.E&G,p. 325. 3 MEGA I/3,p. 116.E&G,pp. 305-06. 4 MEGA I/3, p. 120 (some of Marx's italics deleted). E&G, p. 309. 5 MEGA I/5, pp. 33-34. E&G, p. 418. 6 MEGA I/5, p. 34. E&G, p. 419.~ 7 MEGA I]3, p. 305. 8 Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels Werke, Berlin, Dietz, 1953, (hereafter MEW), XIX, p. 355. English translation in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept o f Nature in Marx, London, NLB, 1973, pp. 110-11. 9 Marx, Grundrisse, Berlin, Dietz, 1953, p. 389. English translation in Martin Nicholas (tr.): Karl Marx: Grundrisse, New York, Vintage, 1973, p. 489. lo MEGA I/3, p. 308 (Marx's italics deleted). English translation in Marx-Engels Collected Works (hereafter: MECW), IV, New York, International, 1975, p. 131. 11 Ibid., pp. 3 0 7 - 0 8 . M E C W , IV, pp. 130-31. 12 MEGA I/6, pp. 553-55. 13 Cf. in this respect, John Hoffman's recent out-of-context citation of a passage from The Holy Family to prove "the simple truth" that Marx was a materialist. Hoffman quotes Marx as saying: "man has not created matter itself. And he cannot even create any productive capacity if matter does not exist beforehand". (John Hoffman, Marxism and the Theory o f PraMs, New York, International Publishers, 1976, p. 83.) Far from being the ontological pronouncement Hoffman takes this to be, the context of Marx's statement reveals that 'the matter' being discussed is land, not the philosophical concept of matter. Marx in fact cites Proudhon's remark that "Let the worker appropriate the products of his work, but I do not understand how ownership of the products involves ownership of the matter", to which Marx adds that through the cultivation of the land, for example, "a new productive capacity of the matter has been created". Clearly, 'the matter' in question here is land, surely one of the forces of production that Marx, in historical materialism, was soon to call 'material', without thereby implying any

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ontological claim about the matter comprising the soil. Note that in this context, Marx continues: "Man has not created the matter (land) itself. And he cannot even create any productive capacity if the matter (land) does not exist beforehand" (MEGA I/3, p. 217). 14 Ibid., p. 309.MECW, IV, p. 133. 15 MEGA I/5, p. 534.MECW, V, p. 4. 16 Ibid., p. 535. E&G. p. 402. 1"7 MEGA I/3, p. 121 (italics added). E&G, p. 310. 18 MEGA I]3,p. 121.E&G,p. 310. 19 MEGA I/5, p. 535. E&G, p. 402. 2o MEGA I/3, p. 114 (Marx's italics deleted). English translation in T. B. Bottomore (tr.): KarlMarx." Early Writings, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 155. zl MEGA 1/5, p. 27 E&G. p. 431. 2z MEGA I/5, p. 9.E&G, p. 408. 23 MEGA 1/5, p. 27. E&G, pp. 4 3 1 - 3 2 . 24 MEGA I/5,p. IO.MECW, V, p. 31. 2 s MEGA 1/5, p. 17. MECW, V, pp. 4 1 - 4 2 . 26 MEGA I/5, p. 18.E&G, p. 420. 27 MEGA I/5, pp. 1 9 - 2 1 . 28 The expression "idealist view of history" (die idealistische Geschichtsanschauung) is certainly to be found in The German Ideology, as a characterization of the views Marx and Engels are attacking. But the term "materialist conception (or interpretation) of history" (die materialistische Auffassung der Geschichte) is not found there or anywhere else, apparently, in Marx's texts. It was Engels who ftrst used the latter term, in his review of Marx' Contribution to the Critique o f Political Economy, in the German language newpaper Das Volk, published in London in August, 1859, and later in AntiDiihring (1878). The term 'historical materialism' was first used by Engels, in English, in his 'Special Introduction' to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892). For a detailed treatment of this issue, cf. Z. A. Jordan: The Development o f Dialectical Materialism, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1967, p. 404, n. 67. 29 MEGA I/5, pp. 2 7 - 2 8 . M E C W , V, p. 54. 30 1bid., pp. 10-11. English translation in Marx and Engels: The German Ideology, Moscow, 1968, p. 32. 31 Ibid., p. 28.MECW, V, p. 54. 32 MEGA, 1/3, p. 170.E&G, p. 335. 33 Thus, Althusser's alleged 'epistemological break' in Marx' thought, which supposedly "divides Marx's thought into two long essential periods: the 'ideological' period before, and the scientific period after" 1845 did not occur, despite Marx's own intentions towards of thoroughgoing refutation of his philosophical past. On the alleged 'break', cf. Althusser, For Marx, New York, Vintage, 1970, pp. 33ff. 34 Cf. the Communist Manifesto, MEGA I/6, p. 550. 35 On the continuity of 'alienated labor' and 'exploitation', cf. Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble, From Alienation to Surplus Value (Sheed and Ward, London, 1972) and Ernest Mandel, The Formation o f the Economic Thought o f Karl Marx, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 1 7 6 - 7 7 . 36 MEW XXI, pp. 2 7 5 - 8 2 . 37 MEW XX, p. 10. English translation in Engels: Anti-Dfihring, Moscow, 1969, p. 15. 38 IBM., p. 24.Anti-Diihring, p. 36.

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39 MEW, XX, p. 11 .Anti.Diihring, p. 16. 40 MEW XXI, pp. 277-78.

41 MEW XX, p. 355. 42 MEGA I/3, p. 123. Marx,Early Writings, p. 164. 43 Jordan, op. eit., p. 333. 44 Plekhanov, For the Sixtieth Anniversary of Hegel's Death (1891). Cf. Jordan, op. tit., pp. 3,348.