Oh,

And reading of Foreign Affairs’ “The Russia File’ to come.

Working through Althusser: “Feuerbach’s ‘Philosophical Manifestoes’”

Anyone who reads the texts on the Reform of Philosophy and the Preface to the Principles will realize that they are true proclamations, a passionate annunciation of the theoretical revelation which is to deliver man from his chains. Feuerbach calls out to Humanity. He tears the veils from universal History, destroys myths and lies, uncovers the truth of man and restores it to him. The fullness of time has come. Humanity is pregnant with the imminent revolution which will give it possession of its own being. Let men at last become conscious of this, and they will be in reality what they are in truth: free, equal and fraternal beings.

Such exortations are certainly manifestoes as far as their author is concerned.

(L.A. For Marx, pg. 43)

What a clever fellow, this Althusser. I am enjoying his writings.

After his sardonic introduction of Feuerbach, Althusser sheds light on the historical context that binds the philosopher’s manifestoes to Marxism. Althusser carefully prefaces any further exploration of the nineteenth century Feuerbach with a warning: he was still working in philosophy (read: ideology).

[I am interested in the recurring citation of existentialism and theology (almost always together). They are present in both Althusser and Lukacs' essays (well, the ones that I have read so far... I can't lie and say I have an extensive understanding of either, at this point).]

So, by the end of the second, third, and fourth pages, I think I’m getting what it’s all about (drum roll) Young Marx v. Mature Marx. Sorry Feuerbach…

(The question of the young Marx, transitional Marx, and mature Marx is dealt with in depth in a later essay, but I think my re-reading has allowed me to ‘connect the dots’ a bit more thoroughly. Read my next entry: Understanding ‘On the Young Marx.’)

Okay. So L.A. is giving this map out of why we care about Feuerbach in Marxism today: (blah, blah gave an exact ideological ‘resolution’ to the young radical intellectuals of 1840′s Germany who were basically freaking out because they had reached this IMPASSE. OMG. And then… Feuerbach makes it all better with this New Philosophy) it was the inversion of history. And this tradition of inversion of ideology (and consequently, history) was carried on by not only our kinda-sorta friend Hegel, but MARX… at least, for a while.

Althusser moves on to say that the Young Marx was not at all Marx during this period (citing his direct borrowing of the ‘inversion of the subject and predicate’ from Feuerbach); in fact, he calls the Young Marx “no more than an avant-garde Feuerbachian applying an ethical problematic to the understanding of human history.

Now, I don’t know about you. But it seems to me like Althusser COMPLETELY disagrees with Lukacs…

In my personal experience in reading both of these authors (and so close together) it seems to me that the later Althusser makes a significant break with what Lukacs deemed “Orthodox Marxism” is what Althusser would have disregarded as Hegelian, Feuerbachian… and even worse, philosophical.

Treacherous treadings for a sycophant like me.

Getting back to the point that I had tried to ignore

…but I couldn’t. There is a little snippet in Lukacs’ essay that sort of… well… to say the very least, made me double-take. After all, there is so much in these so few pages that it’s hard not to get quite excited over the material. (Like, for instance, the disarmingly concise visualization of modernism on page 23:

The more conscientiously the facts are explored–in their isolation, i.e. in their unmediated relations–the less compellingly will they point in any one direction. It is self-evident that a merely subjective decision will be shattered by the pressure of uncomprehended facts acting automatically ‘according to laws.’

I must remember to pull-out Mrs. Dalloway and excerpt the plane scene before the royal gates. But this is just me rambling on and pretending I understand all this.) But it is important to scrutinize the discrepancies in the learning process. I am hoping (and fairly certain) that it is a discrepancy in my own understanding of the material.

So here it is, my conundrum. Lukacs is going on and on about the purpose of Orthodox Marxism, right? And that’s important, but in order to fully explicate the importance of Marxism, Lukacs has to prove the relationship between man and society… or consciousness and society in relation to the proletariat’s self-knowledge as the subject and object of history. He states:

Marx urged us to understand ‘the sensuous world’, the object, reality, as human sensuous activity. this means that man must become conscious of himself as a social being, as simultaneously the subject and the object of the socio-historical process. In feudal society man could not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were still mainly natural. Society was far too unorganized and had far too little control over the totality of relations between men for it to appear to consciousness as the reality of man. (The question of the structure and unity of feudal society cannot be considered in any detail here.) Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society. Capitalism destroyed both the spatio-temporal barriers between different lands and territories and also the legal partitions between the ‘estates.’

I am thinking that his minor parenthetical concession statement is the key to my misunderstanding. But even so, this one paragraph, seemingly so full of eye-opening material, fills me with doubt. When Lukacs says “[i]n feudal society, man could not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were still mainly natural,” it hits a sour chord in my thought-processes.

I can’t help but postulate that perhaps man did not see himself as a social being within the constraints of feudalism because he was not a social being to the extent that humanity ‘recognizes’ itself to be today. In fact, the argument presented in this essay i.e. that consciousness is a product of society and not vice versa, seems to support the idea that consciousness and society are changing, and that it would be expecting too much from poor little history to lead to the over-determined belief in the social system of capitalism as a means (after nearly 7 thousand years of written and political history) of FINALLY discovering that man is an intrinsically social being.

Although (I’m hoping) that this is an instance of my ignorance, I wonder why Lukacs doesn’t cover his bases (sorry, I hate sports) and go into a little bit more detail about it. Just wondering. Does anyone have anything for me?