Why Marx Was Right (15 page)

W
hether the world is made of
matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much
sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a
brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most
formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those
who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a
Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the
concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it
was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to
him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made
out of.

This, among other things,
was what it meant to the materialist philosophers of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, some of whom saw human beings as mere mechanical functions of
the material world. Marx himself, however, regarded this kind of thought as
thoroughly ideological. For one thing, it reduced men and women to a passive
condition. Their minds were seen as blank sheets, on which they received
sensory impressions from the material world outside. And out of these
impressions they formed their ideas. So if these impressions could somehow be
manipulated to produce the ''right'' kind of ideas, human beings could make
steady progress towards a state of social perfection. This was not a
politically innocent affair. The ideas in question were those of an elite of
middle-class thinkers who were champions of individualism, private property and
the free market as well as justice, liberty and human rights. Through this
mind-altering process, they hoped in a paternal sort of way to influence the
behavior of the common people. It is hard to believe that Marx subscribed to
this
kind of materialism.

This is not all that
materialist philosophy meant before Marx got his hands on it. In one way or
another, however, he saw it as a form of thought closely bound up with the
fortunes of the middle classes. His own brand of materialism, as developed in
his
Theses on Feuerbach
and elsewhere, was quite different, and Marx was
fully conscious of the fact. He was aware that he was breaking with an old
style of materialism and originating something quite new. Materialism for Marx
meant starting from what human beings actually were, rather than from some
shadowy ideal to which we could aspire. And what we were was in the first place
a species of practical, material, bodily beings. Anything else we were, or
could be, had to be derived from this fundamental fact.

In a boldly innovative
move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and
put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise
that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all
agents.
They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their
material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit,
but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own
history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic
one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through
the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which
govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply
embedded in our actual behavior.

In this sense, Marx was
more of an antiphilosopher than a philosopher. In fact, Etienne Balibar has
called him ''perhaps . . . the greatest antiphilosopher of the modern age.''
¹

Antiphilosophers are those
who are wary of philosophy—not just in the sense that Brad Pitt might be, but
nervous of it for philosophically interesting reasons. They tend to come up
with ideas that are suspicious of ideas; and though they are for the most part
entirely rational, they tend not to believe that reason is what it all comes
down to. Feuerbach, from whom Marx learned some of his materialism, wrote that
any authentic philosophy has to begin with its opposite, nonphilosophy. The
philosopher, he remarked, must accept ''what in man does
not
philosophise, what is rather opposed to philosophy and abstract thought.''
²
He also commented that ''it is
man
who thinks, not the Ego or Reason.''
³
As Alfred Schmidt observes, ''The understanding of man as a needy, sensuous,
physiological being is therefore the precondition of any theory of
subjectivity.''
⁴
Human consciousness, in other words, is
corporeal—which is not to say that it is nothing more than the body. It is
rather a sign of the way in which the body is always in a sense unfinished,
open-ended, always capable of more creative activity than what it may be
manifesting right now.

We think as we do, then,
because of the kind of animals we are. If our thought is strung out in time, it
is because that is the way our bodies and sense-perceptions are too.
Philosophers sometimes wonder whether a machine could think. Maybe it could,
but it would be in a way very different from ourselves. This is because a
machine's material makeup is so different from ours. It has no bodily needs,
for example, and none of the emotional life which in the case of us humans is
bound up with such needs. Our own kind of thinking is inseparable from this
sensory, practical and emotional context. This is why, if a machine could
think, we might not be able to understand what it was thinking.

The philosophy Marx broke
with was for the most part a contemplative affair. Its typical scenario was
that of a passive, isolated, disembodied human subject disinterestedly
surveying an isolated object. Marx, as we have seen, rejected this kind of
subject; but he also insisted that the object of our knowledge is not something
eternally fixed and given. It is more likely to be the product of our own
historical activity. Just as we have to rethink the subject as a form of
practice, so we have to rethink the objective world as the result of human
practice. And this means among other things that it can in principle be
changed.

Starting with human beings
as active and practical, and then situating their thought within that context,
help us to cast new light on some of the problems which have plagued
philosophers. People who work on the world are less likely to doubt that there
is anything out there than those who contemplate it from a leisurely distance.
In fact, sceptics can exist in the first place only because there is something
out there. If there were not a material world to feed them they would die, and
their doubts would perish along with them. If you believe that human beings are
passive in the face of reality, this may also persuade you to query the
existence of such a world. This is because we confirm the existence of things
by experiencing their resistance to our demands. And we do this primarily
through our practical activity.

Philosophers have
sometimes raised the question of ''other minds.'' How do we know that the human
bodies we encounter have minds like ours? A materialist would reply that if
they did not, we would probably not be around to raise the question. There
could be no material production to keep us alive without social cooperation,
and the capacity to communicate with others is a large part of what we mean by
having a mind. One might also point out that the word ''mind'' is a way of
describing the behavior of a particular kind of body: a creative, meaningful,
communicative one. We do not need to peer inside people's heads or wire them up
to machines to see whether they possess this mysterious entity. We look at what
they do. Consciousness is not some spectral phenomenon; it is something we can
see, hear and handle. Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly
creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call ''mind.'' To
call human beings rational is to say that their behavior reveals a pattern of
meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly
accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the
reverse is true of Marx's materialism.

The materialist's response
to the sceptic is not a knockdown argument. You might always claim that our
experience of social cooperation, or of the world's resistance to our projects,
is itself not to be trusted. Perhaps we are only imagining these things. But
looking at such problems in a materialist spirit can illuminate them in a new
way. It is possible to see, for example, how intellectuals who begin from the
disembodied mind, and quite often end up there as well, are likely to be
puzzled by how the mind relates to the body, as well as to the bodies of
others. It may be that they see a gap between mind and world. This is ironic,
since it is quite often the way the world shapes their own minds that gives
rise to this idea. Intellectuals themselves are a caste of people somewhat
remote from the material world. Only on the back of a material surplus in
society is it possible to produce a professional elite of priests, sages,
artists, counsellors, Oxford dons and the like.

Plato thought that
philosophy required a leisured aristocratic elite. You cannot have literary
salons and learned societies if everyone has to work just to keep social life
ticking over. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
(They are just as rare in advanced societies, where universities have become
organs of corporate capitalism.) Because intellectuals do not need to labour in
the sense that bricklayers do, they can come to regard themselves and their
ideas as independent of the rest of social existence. And this is one of the
many things that Marxists mean by ideology. Such people tend not to see that
their very distance from society is itself socially conditioned. The prejudice
that thought is independent of reality is itself shaped by social reality.

For Marx, our thought
takes shape in the process of working on the world, and this is a material
necessity determined by our bodily needs. One might claim, then, that thinking
itself is a material necessity. Thinking and our bodily drives are closely
related, as they are for Nietzsche and Freud. Consciousness is the result of an
interaction between ourselves and our material surroundings. It is itself a
historical product. Humanity, Marx writes, is "established'' by the
material world, since only by engaging with it can we exercise our powers and
have their reality confirmed. It is the "otherness" of reality, its
resistance to our designs on it, which first brings us to self-awareness. And
this means above all the existence of others. It is through others that we
become what we are. Personal identity is a social product. There could not just
be one person, any more than there could just be one number.

At the same time, however,
this reality should be recognized as the work of our own hands. Not to see it
as this—to regard it as something natural or inexplicable, independent of our
own activity—is what Marx calls alienation. He means the condition in which we
forget that history is our own production, and come to be mastered by it as by
an alien force. For

Marx, writes the German
philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the objectivity of the world "is grounded . .
. in the bodily organisation of human beings, which is oriented towards
action."
⁵

In a sense, then,
consciousness is always in some sense "belated," as reason is belated
in a child. Before we even come to reflect, we are always already situated in a
material context; and our thought, however apparently abstract and theoretical,
is shaped to the core by this fact. It is philosophical idealism which forgets
that our ideas have a foundation in practice. By detaching them from this
context, it can fall victim to the illusion that it is thought which creates
reality.

So there is a close link
for Marx between our reasoning and our bodily life. The human senses represent
a kind of borderline between the two. For some idealist philosophers, by
contrast, ''matter'' is one thing and ideas or "spirit" quite
another. For Marx, the human body is itself a refutation of this split. More
precisely, it is the human body in action which refutes it. For that practice
is clearly a material affair; but it is also, inseparably, a matter of
meanings, values, purposes and intentions. If it is "subjective," it
is also ''objective.'' Or perhaps it throws that whole distinction into
question. Some previous thinkers had seen the mind as active and the senses as
passive. Marx, however, sees the human senses as themselves forms of active
engagement with reality. They are the result of a long history of interaction
with the material world. ''The cultivation of the five senses,'' he writes in
the

Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts,
"is the work of all previous history.''

A thinker like Locke or
Hume starts with the senses; Marx, by contrast, asks where the senses
themselves come from. And the answer goes something like this. Our biological
needs are the foundation of history. We have a history because we are creatures
of lack, and in that sense history is natural to us. Nature and history are in
Marx's view sides of the same coin. As our needs get caught up in history,
however, they undergo transformation. In satisfying certain needs, for example,
we find ourselves creating new ones. And in this whole process, our sensory
life is shaped and refined. All this comes about because the satisfaction of
our needs also involves desire, but it was left to Freud to fill in this part
of the picture.