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Marx and Philosophy Society |
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Fifth annual conference, 24 May 2008 Abstracts Full texts of most of the conference papers are now
available on our past events page. Timothy Hall (East London) The relationship between Marxism and philosophy has long been a
complex issue and still largely divides authors that define their work as
broadly "Marxist". In the field of Politics and International
Relations, for example, the standard distinction between idealism and
materialism – where the former takes ideas to be ultimately determinative in
history and the latter takes productive and material forces – is still
largely in force. This implies that Marxism represents and irrevocable break
with traditional philosophy or as Marx puts it in The German Ideology: "When reality is depicted, philosophy
as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence."
The problem with this approach, however, as Lukács argued in the context of
his critique of Second International Marxism, was that it was reductive and
positivistic. Marxism as a philosophy of history and a social theory was not
without normative assumptions and ontological presuppositions. This meant
that Marxism as a social theory had to become philosophically sophisticated;
it had in other words to become critical and account for its own theoretical
self-possibility. In Lukács's History
and Class Consciousness this took the form of a re-accounting of the
relationship between Marxism and Philosophy where the decisive concepts of
Marxian thought – subject-object, praxis, mediation, totality etc. – are
derived from a critique of "Bourgeois philosophy"(i.e. Kantian and Post-Kantian
Philosophy). Whereas Lukács in the History
and Class Consciousness sees the
engagement with Kantian and post-Kantian idealism as a much more urgent task
for critical social thought than Marx in The
German Ideology, he does understand the position that emerges –
proletarian praxis - as post-philosophical.
Idealist philosophy is trapped within contemplative aporias that ensure that it is incapable of realising itself:
only a sophisticated materialism that understands itself as praxis is capable of self-realisation
and social transformation. This relationship between Marxism and philosophy undergoes a further
transformation in the work of Adorno. For Adorno, the advent of the
"totally administered society" necessitates a critical rethinking
of the central categories of Marxist thought. The former leaves no space for
praxical transformation of the social world. This changed social context
implies that the dismissal of contemplation or the call to overcome it is
both dangerous and premature. For Adorno, the prospect of no space existing
in the administered world from which a critique of society could be mounted
means that the only way that thought can continue to be critical is by
recognising its entanglement with antagonistic society and its affinity with
the very totalising forces in modern society that it seeks to criticise. For Adorno, critical social thought comes
full circle: what began in Marx with the dismissal of philosophical
contemplation and became in Lukács, the attempt to overcome it, comes in
Adorno to take the form of a defence of the very possibility of contemplation
in the face of the prospect of the totally administered world. This paper will distinguish these three accounts of the relationship
between Marxism and Philosophy as three forms of metacritique; the first deriving from The German Ideology in which the material conditions of
possibility of the forms of consciousness are set out and the latter viewed
as 'material sublimates' of the former; the second, deriving from History and Class Consciousness in
which the contemplative antinomies of bourgeois thought are viewed as
deforming radical social critique and thus being necessary to overcome;
finally the last, deriving from Negative
Dialectics, in which the standpoint from which to critique society is
thought of as neither given nor immanently derivable and the possibility of critique is tied to recognising
the affinity of critique with what it seeks to criticise. I will suggest that
the relationship between Marxism and philosophy does not admit of any
ultimate accounting for the simple reason that the relationship is not an
invariant one. Marx's critique of contemplation was carried out in the face
of the decomposition of Hegelian Spirit; Lukács demand to go beyond
contemplative aporias was carried out in the face of the deformation of
Marxist thought by bourgeois methodology; Adorno's philosophical Marxism with
its defence of contemplation is therefore mediated by changed historical
circumstances – the advent of totally administered society - and must be
understood in relation to this. Graduate panel: (1) Silvia de Bianchi (Rome) Even if
it seems that there is not a Marxian philosophy, but properly only a Marxian
critique of philosophy, the best known statement by Marx, -
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world variously; now it is time
to change it" – leads us to reflect on the question of what a Marxian
approach - a historical materialistic one - should consist in. As I will try
to show a Marxian approach to different areas of philosophy, without
contrasting with Marx's assumptions, is possible and necessarily twofold: on
the one hand it reveals the contradiction inside different fields of
philosophy and their function for capitalism, on the other hand a Marxian
approach should be able to improve and develop Marxian genuine categories in
order to let us grasp the contradictions of actual processes changing the
world. To
explain my thesis I give some examples from Marx and Engels works showing the
characters of Marxism as a critique of philosophy possible by asserting a
practical ground. With "practical ground" I mean what Marx in 1846
called "the process of practical human energy" and through this
guideline I try to clarify in which sense a Marxian approach considers
philosophical ideas as effects of social relations of production and how a
Marxian approach might reveal, by means of its powerful critique, the
contradiction inside contemporary philosophy as an expression of capitalistic
relationships. This task is possible to be accomplished, I suggest, by
improving a history of technology Marx proposed in the Capital explaining the relationship between man and nature and
the reflection on what is language as a practical conscience and as a product
of particular forms of human agency (the exchange). I shall try to shed light
on both these questions by developing of the practical ground inside the
context of the theory of circulating Capital showing perspectives that might be opened. (2) Simon Skempton (Middlesex) This paper will assert Marx's status as a philosopher by arguing that his works articulate a philosophy of infinite determinability. The term 'determinability' refers to a state of freedom where the absence of a specific determination enacts a productive malleability. It derives from Schiller's 'Aesthetic Letters', where the 'wholeness' of personality is characterized by freedom from being restricted to any particular determination. It recurs in Feuerbach's notion of human universality, where the universalisability inherent to consciousness involves an unlimitedness free from the restrictions of particularity, an unlimitedness which is made possible by a fundamental lack of determinacy. Marx's early work takes on board this Feuerbachian conception in the form of his concept of Gattungswesen (generic-being). Here, the negativity of the human 'essence', its lack of a substantial determination, is the precondition of social relationality and the limitless malleability of consciousness. It is this universal generic-being that is alienated from the individual by the capitalist mode of production. In the Grundrisse and Capital, Marx argues that capitalism makes possible such universal determinability while alienating it from the individual. The universal insubstantial substitutability of exchange-value, upon which capitalist social universality depends, is a product of general abstract homogeneous labour, labour measured as quantitative units of labour-duration. The universality of exchange-value brings about the infinite determinability of humanity in general, while at the same time alienating it from the human individual, who is in the process reduced to the most limiting one-sided specificity, a cog in the machine of human universality. In the overcoming of capitalism and alienation the generality of production would not produce the generality of exchange-value, of money, which is but the alienation of human generality; it would produce human generality and determinability, not the financial liquidity of exchange-value but the social malleability of the multi-faceted individual. Amy Wendling (Creighton) Marx's excerpt notebooks from the
1850s show how he built his ideas about the role machinery might play in a
liberated social world. In his Grundrisse
(1857-8) and the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-3, Marx develops the
insights from these notebooks into a theory of how machinery could be used to
produce material wealth and decrease the time spent performing alienating
labor, founding the material substrate of a liberated society. I explore the historical construction of
the notions of nature and machinery with which Marx begins. I then explore what Marx means by material
wealth as opposed to value, what he means by suggesting that we treat
"man himself as fixed capital,"(1973,
712; MECW 1987, 29, 97; MEGA2 II, 2, 1.2, 589) and the consequences of this new mode
of valuation for the use of technology in a liberated society. Rather than simply advancing technology, I
suggest that capitalism simultaneously acts as a fetter on technological
development, hobbling especially those technological developments that
undermine the human-labor based value system. Once we disambiguate some nuances in Marx's foundational
concept of labor, his vision of the end of labor is not at all odd, even when
considered alongside his account of labor as the creative source of all
value. Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser) The most effective way to silence
criticism is a justification on the very terms of the likely critique. When
an action is rationally justified, how can reason deny its legitimacy? This
paper concerns critical strategies that have been employed for addressing the
resistance of rationality to rational critique especially with respect to
technology. Foucault addressed this problem in his theory of power/knowledge.
This paper explores Marx's anticipation of that approach in his critique of
the "social rationality" of the market and technology. Marx got
around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much
like the concept of underdetermination in his discussion of the length of the
working day. There are hints of a critique of technology in his writings as
well. In the 1960s and '70s, neo-Marxists and post-structuralists demanded
radical changes in the technological rationality of advanced societies. Soon
technical controversies spread, primarily through the influence of the
environmental movement. The concept of underdetermination was finally
formulated clearly in contemporary science and technology studies, but
without explicit political purpose. Nevertheless, this revision of the
academic understanding of technology contributes to weakening technocratic
rationales for public policy. A new era of technical politics has begun. |
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