Global Financial Crisis 2008 – Article No 23
by Humphrey McQueen
Thesis Eleven
Clichés clog brains. Around the Left, none will do more mischief in meeting the challenge from the crisis in capital accumulation than two lines from Marx’s so-called “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Parroted by people who should know better, this aphorism is twisted into an un-dialectical choice between “interpret” and “change”.
How can we know which change to effect unless we interpret? Change for its own sake leaves fascism as desirable as socialism. Secondly, how do we work out how to effect a desirable change without interpreting?
Marx’s answer was unequivocal. When he scribbled down those notes, he and Engels had just finished their refutation of the Young Hegelians, The Holy Family. They went on to critically criticise contemporary German philosophy for the 400 printed pages of The German Ideology of 1844-45. Engels returned to the struggle against Idealism and mechanistic materialism with Anti-Duhring (1878) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888). Then Plekanhov punctured the Idealists with his Monist Conception of History (1895), reinforced by Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909).
At each intervention, the politics of interpreting was front and centre. The Left needs to return to those exposés to exorcise the mumbo-jumbo spewing out of the New Age, evolutionary psychology, Deep Ecology and the Tao of Physics.
A comparable malaise from within academic Marxism is epitomised by the journal Thesis Eleven, which began in the late 1970s as an off-shoot of student activism. Thirty years on, the only change that its contents are likely to effect is to the promotional prospects of its authors. One title from the edition of August last year says it all: “Radical Finitude Meets Infinity: Levinas’s Gestures to Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology”.
The German Ideology did not find a publisher until the Twentieth-century. Marx never considered publishing his rough notes. Given the confusion they continue to sow, the shame is that they survived the criticism of mice.
To approach a Materialist interpretation of Marx’s comment about interpretation and change, it is essential to study the opening Section of The German Ideology. Those 75 pages help us to grasp why we can interpret the world only by changing it, and hence ourselves, individually and as a species. Moreover, the change referred to in “Thesis Eleven” is not solely political. Marx was thinking about the totality of “sensuous human experience”, which Mao identified as the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.
The aphorism is also historically misleading. From the pre-Socratics, Buddha and Confucius onwards, interpretations by philosophisers had been used to change the world. Philosophy had been the aether filling the space left by ignorance about natural and social processes. By the 1840s, the sciences were spelling an end to philosophising and quasi-theology. The last thing that Marx and Engels wanted to put in the place of such Idealism was mindless militancy.
Marx drafted the four volumes of Capital to write finis under speculation about the social metabolism. The path which Marx opened has to be cleared for each time and place. Lenin spent two years researching The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) to decide whether to oppose the Narodniks; he produced Imperialism, the Newest Stage of Capitalism to work out what to do in the wake of the collapse of the Second International. Mao investigated The Peasant Movement in Yunan to determine revolutionary strategy and tactics in the 1920s.
Nor could those revolutionary practitioners afford to spurn interpretation at the level of abstraction. Lenin spent weeks struggling with Hegel’s Science of Logic to arm himself for revolution in 1917. Mao penned On Contradiction (1937) while waging a two-front war against the Japanese and the Nationalists.
No doubt, the proletariat can move towards socialism without waiting for the algebra to transform values into prices. However, the campaign against Workchoices exposed the bankruptcy of change without interpretation. Stressing Howard’s nasty personality, Left grouplets rarely punctured the ACTU-ALP line about a fair day’s wage. By ignoring the chapters on labour-time in Capital, the grouplets left the working class with no explanation of why Workchoices is essential to the expansion of capitals in this era of globalised labour-times. Hence, the class is disarmed in the fight against Gillard’s Workchoices and her Construction Stasi.
Next: Pensions