Marxism and Existentialism
Novack explores the fundamental incompatibility between these two schools of thought. He argues that while Existentialism starts with the "isolated individual" and subjective experience, Marxism begins with social relations and the material conditions of existence. From the perspective of the Glossary, Existentialism is viewed as a form of Subjectivism, where the subject's consciousness is prioritized over objective reality. Novack contends that Existentialism's focus on "absolute freedom" is a middle-class illusion that ignores the Historical Materialism necessary to understand how social structures actually limit or enable human agency.
In Defense of Engels
This chapter refutes modern attempts to separate Engels from Marx, specifically the claim that Engels introduced a "vulgar" or "positivist" distortion into Marxism. Novack defends Engels's application of dialectics to the natural world. He emphasizes that Engels correctly identified the Laws of Dialectics (such as the transformation of quantity into quality) as objective laws of movement in both nature and history. To reject Engels is, for Novack, to reject the Materialist foundation of Marxism in favor of a narrow, human-centered "praxis" that lacks a scientific basis.
Georg Lukács as a Marxist Philosopher
Novack evaluates Lukács as a brilliant but flawed thinker. He acknowledges Lukács's contributions to understanding Alienation and Reification (the process where human relations take on the appearance of relations between things). However, Novack criticizes Lukács's early work, History and Class Consciousness, for its Hegelian tendencies and its initial rejection of the "dialectics of nature". He argues that Lukács's later political accommodations to Stalinism represented a retreat from the revolutionary essence of Marxism.
The Jesting Philosopher: The Case of Leszek Kolakowski
Novack analyzes Kolakowski's journey from orthodox Marxism to a complete rejection of it. He characterizes Kolakowski as an "apostate" who moved toward Skepticism and Idealism. Novack argues that Kolakowski's disillusionment with Stalinism led him to mistakenly blame the Marxist method itself, eventually adopting a "philosophy of the jester" that mocks the possibility of objective social truth or revolutionary progress.
Sebastiano Timpanaro's Defense of Materialism
Novack expresses qualified support for Timpanaro, who defended "vulgar" materialism against the "Western Marxism" of thinkers like Frankfurt School members. Timpanaro emphasized the biological and physical constraints on humanity—what the Glossary refers to as the Objectivity of the external world. Novack agrees with Timpanaro's insistence that nature exists independently of human consciousness, but cautions that Timpanaro sometimes leans too far into a "pessimistic" materialism that underestimates the power of revolutionary Praxis to transform conditions.
Back to Kant? The Retreat of Lucio Colletti
In this critique, Novack examines Colletti's attempt to excise Hegel from Marxism. Colletti argued that Marx's scientific method was closer to Kantian distinctions than Hegelian contradictions. Novack asserts that this is a "retreat" into Dualism (the separation of mind and matter). By discarding the Unity and Struggle of Opposites, Colletti loses the ability to explain the internal motor of social change, effectively stripping Marxism of its revolutionary dialectic.
Is Nature Dialectical?
This chapter serves as a pillar for Novack's Materialism. He argues against the "humanist" Marxists who claim dialectics only apply to human history. Using the Glossary's definition of Dialectics as the "science of the universal laws of motion," Novack argues that if nature were not dialectical, human society (which emerged from nature) could not be dialectical either. He points to modern science—evolution, physics, and chemistry—as evidence of the Negation of the Negation and other dialectical processes occurring in the non-human world.
Leon Trotsky on Dialectical Materialism
Novack concludes by presenting Trotsky as the premier practitioner of dialectical materialism in the 20th century. He highlights Trotsky's use of the Law of Uneven and Combined Development to explain the Russian Revolution. According to Novack, Trotsky maintained the essential link between scientific Theory and revolutionary Practice, demonstrating that a correct philosophical method is not an academic luxury but a vital tool for the working class to understand and change the world.
Key Glossary Terms Influencing These Synopses:
dialectical materialism—the philosophical world view of Marx and Engels, encompassing both nature and society. Materialist in that it postulates the existence of nature prior to humanity and views material conditions as the underlying cause and determinant of society and mind; dialectical in that it postulates the study of matter in motion and transformation by way of contradiction from one form or state to another.
dialectics of nature—the position, held by classical Marxism, that evolutionary change through the process of internal contradiction is universal in inanimate and organic nature as well as in society and the human thought process. Hegel also believed in a dialectics of nature, but rooted it in a supposed teleological process in which nature was striving for self-consciousness through higher and higher levels of organization, leading to the realization of the Absolute Idea (see entry) in an omniscient and all-powerful subject. Hegelianizers of Marxism retain Hegel's belief that consciousness is required for the existence of contradiction and generally deny that nature apart from human activity is dialectical. Positivistic versions of Marxism reject the dialectics of nature for opposite reasons, maintaining that universal laws of change are incompatible with the findings of the specialized and compartmentalized sciences.
materialism—philosophically, the view that all of reality is composed of matter in motion, including mind, which is the product of the physical brain in social life. Materialism rejects all supernatural explanations of phenomena. In contrast to vulgar materialism, Marxism does not reduce phenomena to mechanical motion, but postulates distinct sets of laws for nature, society, and thought. It holds, nevertheless, that nature and material conditions in general have causal priority in explaining the development of society and thought.
praxis—in general the activity of people in pursuit of their aims. It is popularized by Hegelianizing Marxists to designate social action based on and integrated with theoretical understanding. As they use it, the term implies the ability of revolutionary will to substitute for a lack of propitious objective opportunities.
alienation—literally, separation from, as in the selling of property or the loss of someone's affection. By extension, the loss of one's creations with a consequent sense of aloneness and powerlessness. This concept is central in twentieth-century existentialism, certain schools of socialist humanism, and various psychological interpretations of Marxism. At the same time, Althusser and the Maoists have tried to extirpate this concept from Marxism, leaving it only in the specific form of the alienation of the product of labor under capitalism. Alienation in the Marxist sense has a double origin, in the powerlessness of human beings to control nature, and, secondly, in class society, in the alienation of labor as well as its product. Marx distinguished here not only the physical appropriation of the products made by the exploited but also the feeling among workers that their laboring activity itself was alien to them and did not satisfy their needs. Additionally there is the sense of separation from humanity as a group, inevitable under class society, and the lack of solidarity with other' specific individuals one comes in contact with. Above all, alienation expresses the fact that the objective creations of labor come to dominate their creators so that the market in commodity production stands over them as an alien power.
Purchase:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments