Page 212 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes The atheistic bent of Marx was reinforced by Feuerbach’s humanistic critique of Hegelian dialectics,
enabling him to move away from idealism towards materialism. Using Feuerbach’s transformative
method, Marx criticized Hegel for inverting the relationship between the predicate and the subject.
The individual, in Hegel’s philosophy, instead of remaining a real subject was turned into a
predicate of universal substance. Marx pointed out that belief in God derived from attributing
human virtues to an illusory subject, rather than to the human being. Just as religion did not make
people, similarly a constitution did not shape people. On the contrary, both religion and constitution
were made by the people. By this logic, the material world could be transformed, rather than just
being understood. The task of philosophy was to be critical, and participate in that transformation.
As he observed in the eleventh Theses on Feuerbach (1845) “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world in various ways; the point, however is to change it”.
Marx criticized Feuerbach for reducing religion to its secular origins, without offering an explanation
of the duality in human existence. He rejected Feuerbach’s materialism as passive, for objects were
seen in a contemplative way rather than as “sensuous, practical human activity”. Since materialists
like Feuerbach failed to offer an effective cure, idealism developed the active side of matter in an
abstract way. The mind could be freed from mystification only if the negativities of social life were
removed through practical action. Hence Marx began with the conception of socialized humanity,
rather than the civil society of old materialism. He replaced God with money in On The Jewish
Question (1848).
Money is the universal, self contained value of all things. Hence it has robbed the
whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the
alienate essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominated him as he
worships it.
From a materialist perspective, Marx analyzed the economic mode of production the way people
actually lived and engaged in production. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote :
We must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all
history, the premise namely that men must be in a position to live in order to be able
to “make history”. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a
habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production
of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed
this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today as thousands
of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.
Marx, in his analysis of history, mentioned the important role of ideology in perpetuating false
consciousness among people, and demarcated the stages which were necessary for reaching the
goal of Communism. In that sense, both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were performing their
historically destined roles. In spite of the deterministic interpretation of history, the individual
had to play a very important role within the historical limits of his time, and actively hasten the
process.
Marx was a revolutionary with a belief in the philosophy of praxis. Implicit in his belief was an
underlying assumption of a law operating all the time which led to Engels’ formulation of the
dialectics of nature. This alteration changed the very essence of Marx’s method of arriving at a
conclusion from a particular event or a happening, to a general theory or framework determining
even the small happenings.
Marx had a very powerful moral content in his analysis, and asserted that progress was not
merely inevitable, but would usher in a perfect society free of alienation, exploitation and
deprivation. His materialistic conception of history emphasized the practical side of human activity,
rather than speculative thought as the moving force of history. In the famous funeral oration
speech, Engels claimed that Marx made two major discoveries—the law of development of human
history and the law of capitalist development.

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