Marx, materialism and the limits of philosophy

Abstract

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 com binations and that aU such material things exist independently of human cognition, respectively. Both the orthodox and their non-Marxist opponents typicaUy aUege 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 usuaUy attributed the founding of orthodox Marxism itself. Since the pubUcation of Georg Lukacs' 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 con troversy 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 mate riaUsm') 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 materiaUsm 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';