More than a theory: ‘a guide to action!’ Theses on Marx (on reading Ernst Bloch, the principle of hope)

Abstract

The article argues that Marx's materialism has not been understood by Marxists, and that, without a radical reorientation, a new beginning – essential today – is impossible. Marx departed from all earlier materialism because it omitted ‘the active side’, missing the essential understanding that the ‘being’ which determines consciousness has been, continues to be – and now demands to be – changed by human practice. The proletariat is the agency of the socialist change corresponding to ‘the standpoint of socialised humanity’, the future. The depths of the earlier materialism's failure were epitomised by Joseph Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism, circulated world-wide, to Communist Party members at the time of the Moscow trials. A suitable background to the state murder of tens of millions, it ignored completely ‘the active side’. Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope rescued Marx's materialism, showing that the proletarian standpoint encompasses the struggle for the whole of the arts and sciences.