02.03.08

More on ideology/idealism

Posted in Philosophy, 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 5:11 pm by nemo

Filed under: Introduction to Marxism class, economics, socialism — louisproyect @ 7:45 pm

(This was posted to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list, an online class. For more information go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/.)

I have already commented on this ‘Marxism class’, and also on idealism/ideology, and should leave them alone, but the question of Marx’s German Ideology raises a significant, and no doubt heretical, point. The context of Marx’s reaction against ‘German idealism’ as the world ‘idealism’ devolved to ‘ideology’ was the passage from ‘philosphy’ to the study of ideology.
But that reactive phase seems dated now, despite its grand drama in the generation of Hegel followed by the collapse of Hegel, and misses the point that the ideologies that concern us now are hardly those connected with ‘idealism’, in its grand phase at least. They are actually those connected with scientism (and, no doubt, fundamentalism and religion).
It is true that ‘idealism’ can be shown to have connections with rightist positions on politics, but the association is not intrinsic, and the ‘idealism’ (which shouldn’t be called that) of Kant is actually the great source of liberal/socialist ‘ideologies’. (The picture is complex).
The problem is that Marx/Marxists ended up confronted not by the exploitation of Prussian elites using Hegelianism for that, but with the ideological one-dimensionality of the very scientism the Second Internationale embraced as a new almost religious mode of thought.
In fact, one possible way to study ideology might be to take the stance of Kantian idealism, with its unmatched clarity about the confusions of metaphysics, from which Marxism is not exempt. It was the great ethical socialist Cohen who noted that the true founder of German socialism was Kant (even as the classical liberals attempt to claim him).

In any case, the bungled nature of Marx’s theories (if not his exposes of economic ideology!) as theories lies in their inability to follow the rubric of Kantianism 101, in the interplay of causality and freedom.
Marx was a frustrated transcendental idealist!

Marx wrote “The German Ideology ” in 1845 in a bid to help men and women “revolt” against “the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.” Primarily, this meant establishing materialism as a guide to understanding the world, as opposed to the dominant idealist trend in German philosophy. To start with, it was necessary to understand that humanity distinguished itself from animals as soon as it “began to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”

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