In the philosophical and social thought of the 19th and 20th centuries, a special and significant place is occupied by the concept created in the mid-19th century by Karl Marx and subsequently developed by many other Marxist theorists. Due to the fact that the provisions of Marxism served as an ideological platform for the communist movement and many revolutionary uprisings around the world, the most significant of which were undoubtedly the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which brought the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin to power, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong, Marxism in its various versions has had the most serious impact on the historical destinies of many countries, but with the collapse of the USSR this influence has been steadily declining. In theoretical terms, however, Marxism was and remains one of the leading social concepts, which in many ways determined the appearance of modern social science. In the history of philosophy, Marxism appears as the heir and at the same time the antipode of Hegel’s idealism, which turned Hegel’s thought “upside down”, i.e. gave philosophy a critical social orientation and transformed theoretical criticism into a tool serving the goals of revolutionary social transformations.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born in 1818 in Trier to a Prussian lawyer of Jewish origin. He studied at the University of Bonn for a time, then continued his studies in Berlin from 1836, and received his PhD by correspondence from the University of Jena in 1841. His political views did not allow him to teach at the university, and he began his creative activity as a contributor to a number of radical left-wing periodicals, publishing articles with uncompromisingly harsh criticism of the social and spiritual foundations of Germany. Thanks to their joint collaboration on the “Deutsche-Franzungen Annals”, Marx met Friedrich Engels (born in 1820 in Barmen), the son of a textile manufacturer, who was interested in the problems of the labor movement, political economy and sociology and who became his closest friend and comrade-in-arms. Some of their early works were written jointly by them (The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1845), The German Ideology (1845-1846, first published in 1932 in Russia). From 1843, Marx was in exile, first in Paris, then in Brussels, and from 1849 he settled in
London. Throughout their lives, Marx and Engels were the most active participants in the communist labor movement; Engels even took part in an armed uprising of workers in the south of Germany. Marx and Engels took the most direct part both in the theoretical plane (being the authors of the famous “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), the theoretical platform of the Communist Union) and in the organizational plane in the creation of the 1st International, the International Workers’ Union (1864) and actively participated in its work until its collapse in 1873, and then continued their cooperation with the German Social Democratic Party.
Marx’s development as a thinker was decisively influenced by Hegel’s philosophy, of which he was always a categorical opponent, but it was precisely his opposition to Hegel and his fundamental criticism of Hegel’s philosophy that led to the creation of his own philosophical concept. The break with philosophical thinking represented by Hegel’s idealism was so decisive that Marx considered it necessary to completely abandon the traditional form of philosophical theory and focused on creating the so-called “materialistic understanding of history” – a comprehensive critical social science based on the criticism of political economy. Therefore, in the mature period of his work, he devoted all his efforts to the creation of a fundamental work entitled “Capital. Critique of Political Economy” (the first volume was published in 1867, the next two volumes were published posthumously under the editorship of Engels in the 80s-90s). In-depth scientific studies became possible for Marx thanks to the material support of his friends, primarily Engels. In the 1970s and 1980s, Engels worked on a number of works in which he sought to give Marxist theory the form of a unified philosophical concept covering all areas of science: methodology, natural science, social science, these were Anti-Dühring (1876-1878) and Dialectics of Nature (unfinished, first published in 1925 in Russia). Thanks to Engels, Marxist theory acquired the form of a system consisting of three main parts: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and scientific socialism. In this regard, it should be noted that the general appearance of Marxist theory, which received its name from its creator, Marx, owes much to the works of Engels and other Marxists, which requires the researcher to make a clear distinction between the views of not only subsequent diverse theorists of Marxism, but also between the views of its founders themselves, without identifying them in any way. Marx died in 1883 in London, leaving his major work unfinished. Engels outlived him by 12 years. Of Engels’s last works, it is worth mentioning “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In Connection with the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan” (1884), devoted to the problems of studying ancient societies, and “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1886).
Young Marx. Of the works of young Marx, the most interesting in philosophical terms are the so-called “Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” (first published in Russia in 1932). They contain a number of provisions that reveal the complex relationship of Marx’s thought to Hegel and Feuerbach and show the difficult path taken by the young thinker.
In the Manuscripts, Marx appears as an ardent supporter of atheistic humanism, advocating for the liberation of man not only from religion, but also from all other forms of alienation of the human essence – in labor, in politics – that oppose man himself. In this, he identifies with Feuerbach and fully supports his criticism of Hegelian idealism. However, Marx considers it necessary to continue and strengthen the criticism of philosophy begun by Feuerbach. Feuerbach proved that “philosophy is nothing but religion expressed in thoughts and logically systematized, nothing but another form, another mode of existence of the alienation of the human essence, and that, therefore, it is also subject to condemnation”, therefore, the course of Marx’s own thought is as follows: from the condemnation of religion, which seems to him something self-evident, it is necessary to move on to the condemnation of philosophy on the same grounds. Marx sees the essential weakness of Feuerbach’s criticism primarily in the fact that the positive basis for criticism in Feuerbach is the idea of man as a sensual, natural being. This is the limitation of Feuerbach’s philosophical method itself, which starts from man as an immediate given. “To the negation of the negation, which asserts that it is absolutely positive,” he contrasted “the positive resting on itself and positively based on itself” (1: 42, 154), i.e., Hegel’s criticism of the forms of consciousness, carried out by him in the Phenomenology of Spirit and built on the method of double reflection or double negation (see the chapter on Hegel), is replaced in Feuerbach by criticism from the position of humanism, which starts in advance from man as a given, and as a given in an immediate sensual way. In this double immediacy, Marx quite rightly sees the weakness of Feuerbach’s position in comparison with Hegel. In opposing Hegel together with Feuerbach, Marx nevertheless does not forget about the strong side of Hegel’s philosophy, first of all about his method of negating the negation, to which he wants to give an exclusively critical direction. Therefore, in Hegel’s thinking, he is primarily dissatisfied with the fact that Hegel’s phenomenological criticism reduces all forms of consciousness to their unity in philosophy and ultimately thereby affirms all available forms of the spirit within the framework of the philosophical form of the spirit. He is also dissatisfied with the fact that philosophy takes on in Hegel the form of the total activity of the absolute spirit, subordinating all forms of the spirit to itself, including individual human consciousness. Marx expresses his protest in the form of an affirmation of the position of humanism, close to Feuerbach’s, but striving to present human essence as something mediated; in the manuscripts of 1844, Marx uses the concept of nature and the relationship of man to nature through labor for this purpose. Therefore, although Marx speaks of man there, it is by no means Feuerbach’s immediate and sensual man, but a manconsidered from the position of the mediation of human existence by the relation to nature. Based on his anthropological position, Marx criticizes Hegel for replacing man with the self-consciousness of man and for the fact that the consideration of the contradictions of consciousness within the framework of the phenomenology of the spirit in the aspect of self-consciousness or the unity of consciousness turns them all into “entities” “in mental form”, “mental entities” (1: 42, 156). According to Marx, Hegel overlooked the alienation of man from the opposite and, as a consequence, inhuman objectivity of the surrounding reality. Therefore, within the framework of Hegel’s philosophy, the alienation of the human essence is as much sublated as it is affirmed: “Insofar as self-conscious man has recognized the spiritual world as self-alienation and sublated it – or the universal spiritual being of his world – he nevertheless affirms it again in this alienated form, presents it as his true being, restores it, assures that he is in his otherness as such with himself” (1: 42, 166). In contrast to Hegel’s rooting of human existence in the absolute spirit, Marx puts forward the concept of man in connection with nature. Man is something that enters into nature, “an objective, natural being”, and by no means a purely spiritual being. It is precisely this appeal to nature that prevents Marx from finally establishing his position, since it forces him to recognize certain natural foundations of human existence and thereby sets limits to criticism.
Therefore, the further development of Marx’s thought will consist in his entering into an even more intense confrontation with Hegelian philosophy in order to, using Hegel’s idea of absolute mediation in the spirit, reverse the Hegelian method and give it an even greater critical direction by turning it against the Hegelian concept of the spirit, starting from the absolute mediation of social reality. This decisive turn will occur in the works “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) and “The German Ideology” (1845-1846).
The materialistic understanding of history. The critical revolution accomplished by Marx in relation to Hegelian philosophy consisted in the following. Marx used Hegel’s idea of the substance-subject, but presented it not as the total activity of the absolute spirit, but as a critical practice, a pure subjective activity, including the object of activity, the substance in the course of the activity itself, and thus both removing and simultaneously restoring the gap between consciousness and objectivity.
In the very first and most important of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx emphasizes precisely this aspect of his understanding of practice, which goes beyond the traditional oppositions of the subject, or activity, to the object, or substance: “The chief defect of all previous materialism… is that the object, reality, sensibility is taken only in the form of an object or in the form of contemplation, and not as a sensuous-human activity, practice, not subjectively” (1: 42, 261). Having created his own analogue of Hegel’s substance-subject in the form of the socio-historical practice of humanity, Marx already resolves all previous philosophical problems in relation to it from the position of the so-called “materialistic understanding of history.” The problem of nature and the problem of true cognition of an object by thinking are transferred by thesis No. 2 from the purely philosophical to the practical plane: “The question of whether human thinking possesses objective truth is not a theoretical question at all, but a practical question. In practice, man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sideliness of his thinking” (1: 42, 261). This “materialistic understanding of history” transfers the relationship to nature inside the subject, i.e., presents it as exclusively mediated by the activity of society. In turn, all questions connected with the abstraction of nature are removed: “the question disappears by itself if we take into account that the notorious “unity of man with nature” has always taken place in industry, changing in each era depending on the greater or lesser development of industry, just as the “struggle” of man with nature, leading to the development of his productive forces on the corresponding basis” (3: 2, 23), “the surrounding sensory world is not at all some kind of thing given directly from the age, always equal to itself, but that it is a product of industry and the social state, moreover, in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole series of generations” (3: 2, 23). In the same spirit, in The German Ideology the concept of consciousness is initially linked with the social activity of man: “Consciousness can never be anything other than conscious being, and the being of men is the real process of their life” (3: 2, 20). “Consciousness, therefore, is already from the very beginning a social product and remains so as long as men exist at all” (3: 2, 27). The concepts of man and society are united in a single perspective in thesis no. 3: “The materialistic doctrine of changing circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator himself must be educated. It is therefore forced to divide society into two parts, one of which rises above society. The coincidence of changing circumstances and human activity, or self-change, can be considered and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (1: 42, 262). We find similar statements in the German Ideology: “Circumstances create people to the same extent,in which people create circumstances” (3: 2, 37), accordingly, “in revolutionary activity, changing oneself coincides with the transformation of circumstances” (3: 2, 191).
The eternal philosophical problem of human essence or human nature is also resolved through an appeal to the social whole in thesis No. 6: “The essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in a separate individual. In its reality, it is the totality of all social relations” (1: 42, 262). Now it is no longer difficult for Marx to subject to total criticism everything in “society” and “man” that had hitherto been regarded as given by nature and had blocked a total criticism of reality. Criticism can and should be continued deeper than natural human relations (for example, family) and natural human feelings (for example, religious), since in relation to Marx’s socio-historical practice, all other human activity can be presented as internally contradictory, limited activity, as activity in a “certain form of society” (1: 42, 263). Thus arises one of the most important Marxist concepts of a social form or socio-economic formation as a totality of certain historical social relations or society at a certain stage of development. For Marx, the determining factor in the formation of social relations is labor practice—the productive activity of man in certain historical conditions. This same practice in its pure, negative, or critical meaning must lead to a radical reorganization of society, to a revolution. Marx gives his formulation of the goal of critical practice, which is replacing philosophy, in his famous final thesis No. 11: “Philosophers have only explained the world in various ways, but the point is to change it” (1: 42, 263).
The materialistic conception of history, which had already taken shape in the main in The German Ideology, finds its complete formulation in a passage from the preface to Marx’s work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “My researches have led me to the result that legal relations, just like the forms of the state, cannot be understood either from within themselves or from the so-called general development of the human spirit, that, on the contrary, they are rooted in the material relations of life. In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary relations independent of their will – relations of production, which correspond to a certain stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which rises the legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations are transformed into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. No social formation perishes before all the productive forces for which it provides sufficient scope have developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have matured in the womb of the oldest society itself. In general terms, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern, bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs of the economic social formation. Bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production… but the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society at the same time create the material conditions for the resolution of this antagonism. Therefore, the prehistory of human society ends with the bourgeois social formation” (3: 4, 137-138).
However, Marx’s writings give very brief descriptions of how exactly this leap of humanity “from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom” will take place, during which power will pass into the hands of the proletariat and the productive forces of society will be socialized, and of what the subsequent, communist period in human history will be like. Most of Marx’s works contain what can be defined as a critique of ideology, which later became something of a special genre for all post-Marxist social literature.
Critique of Ideology. Marx contrasts his critical revolutionary practice with specific types of labor activity, which, in relation to practice, appear as historically limited and defective forms of realizing the human essence and are called ideology. “Where does it come from that the relations [of individuals] acquire an independent, opposed existence? To answer in one word: division of labor” (3: 2, 76). All forms of divided labor, or forms of the present spirit (to use Hegel’s terminology), or forms of culture (to use modern language) as supposedly independent as an ideology must be subjected to criticism and destroyed. The main blow falls on religion. Critique of ideology, being entirely formal, frees itself from the need to enter into the consideration of questions of religion and faith. The matter is considered settled and not subject to discussion; religion is a “perverse worldview” and is subject to unconditional condemnation and rejection. That is why we do not find any explicit discussion of theological questions in Marx; the discussion is always only about religion as a form of ideology. This criticism immediately refers us from the “perverse worldview” to its foundation, to the “perverse world,” the world of private property and the division of labor. According to the conditions of the criticism of ideology, we find the true essence of religion outside of it and not simply in “society, the world of man,” but in a world where man is oppressed and exploited, a world that is contradictory in itself. That is why religion is defined only through reference to the “perverse world” that gave birth to it. Religion in itself appears to be only a harmful habit, the “opium of the people.” In this case, the whole fault of the world or its “vicissitudes” is that it gives birth to religion. The peculiarity of the critique of ideology is that it is entirely focused on the movement from one form of ideology or form of consciousness to its foundation in the next, more fundamental form of consciousness, and in such a way that we are simultaneously deprived of the possibility of a meaningful discussion of questions related to the subject of criticism. The refusal to discuss theological questions is carried out by Marx consistently, right up to the rejection of the atheistic position: since, in accordance with the logic and conditions of the critique of ideology, atheism is nothing more than a “critical religion”, “the last stage of theism, the negative recognition of God” (3: 1, 121). Moreover, Marx does not even negatively connect the sphere of religion and the sphere of politics, rejecting the thesis that the abolition of religion, atheism, “is a necessary condition for civil equality” (3: 1, 99). Religion is deprived of all natural foundations and all previous explanations to which the previous critique was inclined (fear, ignorance, dependence on nature, etc.). The roots of religion are placed exclusively in some social form, which is called upon to explain all aspects of religious life by material social conditions.
Marx pays even less attention to the problems of morality and art than to religious questions. Morality is also declared to be only one of the forms of ideology, due to which it is considered exclusively as “under certain circumstances a necessary form of self-affirmation of individuals”, and therefore “the communists do not put forward either egoism against selflessness. Nor selflessness against egoism… they do not preach any morality… they do not make a moral demand on people” and even pronounce “the death sentence on any morality – be it the morality of asceticism or pleasure” (3: 2, 223 – 224), since from the “scientific” point of view all moral questions are a product of certain social conditions, have their social roots in the living conditions of certain classes, and therefore the critical researcher can consider himself free from the concepts of right and wrong, since “in scientific studies of economic relations this leads to confusion” (1: 8, 274). The true resolution of all moral collisions is possible only in the course of revolutionary practice. Therefore, “the ‘amoral revolutionary proletarians’ are alien to any ‘moral stupidities’, since they ‘have the impious intention not to ‘honestly earn’ their ‘pleasure’, but to conquer it’ (3: 2, 195).
The Marxist treatment of art is even poorer than the analysis of religion and morality. Art is also unconditionally related to forms of ideology or forms of social consciousness, and is therefore deprived of its own content in advance. All references to the theme of art in Marx are merely illustrations of the social problems depicted; it is for this purpose that he turns in his works to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante or Rubens. Thus, it is said of Raphael that “Raphael, like any other artist, was conditioned by the technical achievements in art achieved before him, by the organization of society and the division of labor in his area” (3: 2, 367). In scientific communism, the ideological character of art, which stems primarily from the division of labor, is supposed to be overcome by abolishing the division of labor as a whole and thereby providing the opportunity to develop one’s artistic abilities to everyone “in whom Raphael sits.” Thus, art is not discarded, like morality, but, on the contrary, it is assumed that art will become the property of all.
Critique of ideology leads us from the untrue forms of religion, morality and art to their truth in “reality”. The latter is presented by Marx as the sphere of politics and the sphere of civil society. Therefore, the “truth” of religion is revealed to us primarily in politics. “This state, this society, gives birth to religion, to a false world view, for they themselves are a false world” (1:1,414). Accordingly, a real critique of religion cannot be a critique of religion as such, but must become a critique of the reality that gives birth to religion. Just as the critique of philosophy previously became a critique of religion, so now “the critique of religion is transformed into a critique of law, the critique of theology into a critique of politics” (1:1,415). In the work “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843), the general position of the critique of ideology is quite clearly outlined. Its essence is that the political forms and contradictions between them, which Hegel analyzes in his philosophy of law, unfold in the reverse order, and the contradictions are not removed in the higher form, but, on the contrary, are aggravated in a deeper contradiction, revealed in a lower, more fundamental, as the criticism of ideology tries to present it, form. “Hegel’s main mistake is that he understands the contradiction of a phenomenon as a unity in essence, in an idea, whereas the said contradiction has, of course, something deeper in its essence, namely, an essential contradiction. Thus, for example, here the contradiction of legislative power in itself (Here we are talking about the contradiction of the monarchical principle and the principle of the class element. – Yu. S. ) is only a contradiction of the political state, and consequently, a contradiction of civil society with itself” (1:1, 324). The final contradiction of the political sphere turns out to be its contradiction as a whole with its own foundation in civil society or in the contradictions of civil society. “From the various moments of national life, the formation of the political state, the state system, was accomplished with the greatest difficulty. It developed in relation to other spheres as a universal reason, as something otherworldly in relation to them. The historical task then became to return the political state to the real world” (1:1, 254).
Using politics as an example, we can easily identify the most characteristic features of the so-called “ideology”, and equally characteristic methods of the criticism of ideology itself. Any ideology is characterized, first of all, by contradiction. Further, it is characterized by: imaginary independence, the absence, as a consequence, of its own history. The subject of criticism of ideology is always pushed from the present to the past, therefore ideology is always presented as something already outdated, a relic, or a fetter on development, a brake on progress. Ideology always serves only to express reality, is its representative. But even this expression always distorts reality, creates illusions, turns everything upside down, rather masks reality than gives a true idea of it. Accordingly, any ideology can be exposed only by criticism of ideology, revealing its “empirical conditions” in another form as its truth (3: 2, 328 – 329). The characterization of these empirical conditions is reduced to the depiction of civil society “Empirical observation must in each individual case – by experience and without any mystification and speculation – reveal the connection of the social and political structure with production. Individuals not in representation, but in reality, that is – how they act, materially produce within certain material boundaries” (3:2, 19). Accordingly, the center of gravity of the study shifts towards political economy.
Critique of political economy. On the one hand, political economy appears as a form of ideology and is subject to corresponding criticism; on the other hand, criticism of the subject of political economy itself—the economic relations of production and exchange—reveals their foundations in the reality of “social relations” and presents us with the true subject of the materialistic understanding of history—the socio-economic formation. For this reason, it is Capital, which contains criticism of political economy, that acts as the foundation of all previous criticism of society, developed in Marx’s works. From the standpoint of social form, economic relations are viewed by Marx as relations primarily between people, not between things, and as relations permeated with internal contradictions. In the simplest and most fundamental relationship between two commodities in the act of exchange, Marx discerns a whole complex of internal contradictions: between these two commodities, between the use value and the exchange value of each commodity – a contradiction that still fits entirely within the framework of the subject of political economy, which, in fact, reveals behind the external appearance of a commodity its universal substance as value, between two types of labor – abstract labor in general and concrete, operating within the framework of the division of labor, each of which creates its own type of value – concrete labor creates use value (the commodity with its useful, consumer side), abstract labor creates the value of the commodity, manifesting itself in the act of exchange. Marx considered this discovery of the dual nature of labor to be his significant achievement. Finally, value itself contains an internal contradiction between the relative and equivalent forms of value, expressed in the relations of commodities to each other, allowing the hidden property of the value of a commodity to be expressed externally in another commodity, opposing it in the act of exchange. It should be noted that the contradiction of divided labor, which is central to the critique of ideology and gives rise to all types of ideology, takes on its simplest and most fundamental form in Capital as a contradiction between two commodities created by two types of labor; the study brought this contradiction to its crudest, objective-material expression in the form of the independence of two commodities and two types of labor. Marx deepens the analysis of this contradiction to the point of presenting an internal contradiction in the form of commodity exchange, which leads to the fact that the relations between commodities become increasingly complex due to the inclusion of an intermediary in their relations first in the form of money: the inherent contradiction of exchange asserts itself in the form of an objective intermediary, in which this initial contradiction is by no means resolved or is resolved, as in exchange, and is again asserted and consolidated in an objective form, and then the development of monetary relations makes it possible to discover how social relations are woven into economic relations, at that stage of development of monetary relations which makes it possible to develop such a form,as capital.
“As the conscious bearer of this movement, the owner of money becomes a capitalist. The objective content of this circulation – the increase of value – is its subjective goal, and insofar as the growing appropriation of abstract wealth is the sole motive of his operations, to that extent – and only to that extent – does he function as a capitalist, that is, as personified capital endowed with will and consciousness” (2: 1, 163-164). Marx emphasizes that here we are dealing not simply with the activity of an individual using his money in a special way and extracting a certain profit from commodity circulation, but first and foremost with a social form, with a special subject – a conscious “self-propelled substance, self-propelled value” (2: 1, 165-166), capital in general. With the transition from purely speculative to productive capital, which uses the labor power of hired workers, the contradiction between capital and activity, or labor, bought and sold as a commodity, becomes decisive for social production relations. As Marx emphasizes, the appearance of this commodity on the market was preceded by an entire historical epoch, during which a class of workers arose who were deprived of the means of production and, as a result, were forced to sell their labor power to capitalists on the market. In labor, which is contradictory or dual in its social form, Marx discovers the source that produces both value and, ultimately, capital. Moreover, this is not just labor, but surplus labor, labor that increases value. “That part of the working day during which [the worker] produces the daily value of labor power … I call necessary labor time, and the labor expended during this time – necessary labor. The second period of the labor process is the one during which the worker works beyond the limits of necessary labor … I call surplus labor time, and the labor expended … surplus labor” (2:1, 228). Thus, according to Marx, the source of the capitalist’s profit and at the same time the source of the growth of social capital as a whole and social wealth in general is surplus labor – labor that is appropriated by the capitalist and only partially compensated to the worker in the form of wages. In this regard, the study also raises the topic of the exploitation of someone else’s labor by capital or the problem of unpaid labor. It should be said that the sale of his labor power by the worker is carried out in full accordance with the laws of the market, that is, at a fair market price, so it is quite difficult to talk about unpaid labor here, which Marx himself admits (see: 2:1, 543). What is understood by exploitation in its pure form is presented as a contradiction between property and labor, in which the entire amount of value that forms capital is created by surplus labor and thus allegedly owes its existence exclusively to the labor of the worker.
From a philosophical point of view, the phenomenon of exploitation can be considered as an analogue of Hegel’s cunning of reason, which forces ordinary consciousness to work for the purposes of history as a whole. The difference between the Hegelian and Marxist approaches to the problem of the exploitation of the individual efforts of individuals by a social whole then consists in the fact that the former takes the position of reason and the cunning of reason and recognizes history’s right to move forward, even if only through the activity of its participants, whereas Marxism discovers this contradiction only as a contradiction in a certain historical form of society, related to the prehistory of humanity, and intends to destroy this contradiction in favor, if not of the historical figures themselves, then of a certain “labor force” that must be given back what was taken from it by the historical process, which, in essence, means the necessity of rejecting the historical process itself in its progressive version. In order to resolve this contradiction, it is no longer possible to limit oneself to theoretical analysis; it is necessary to exit the production process itself, which is equivalent to going beyond the framework of concrete history. The study can theoretically foresee this step: “The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist shell. It explodes. The hour of capitalist private property strikes. The expropriators are expropriated” (2: 1, 773), but it is not able to depict it in a concrete way in the study, much less take any steps in this direction, due to its own internal limitations, conditioned primarily by the purely critical, one-sidedly negative character of Marxist theory as a whole.
Because of this internal contradiction, the entire subsequent history of Marxist theory demonstrates to us various variants of Marxist “heresies”, each of which emphasizes one or another side of Marxism, but does not maintain the balance in theory that was achieved by the creator of Marxism himself, which already forced Marx to constantly disown certain distortions of Marxism and declare that he himself is not a “Marxist”. Significant shifts in Marxist theory can already be traced in the theoretical work of Engels, who after Marx’s death acted as Marx’s theoretical executor. He did a lot to consolidate Marxist theory, but at the same time, in Engels we find a turn from the strict criticality of Marxism to the creation of a unique version of positivist philosophy: “Modern materialism is essentially dialectical and no longer needs any philosophy standing above other sciences. And then, of all the previous philosophy, the doctrine of thinking and its laws still retains an independent existence – formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is included in the positive science of nature and history” (3: 5, 20). Such a statement, as applied to Engels, also meant a return from the unified Marxist theory to the dualism of history and nature and, accordingly, the Kantian dualism of sciences, as well as thinking and reality, the question of the origin and resolution of which is not even raised. Engels thereby obscured the deep philosophical roots of Marxist materialism and gave it the appearance of ordinary “scientific” philosophy in the spirit of the end of the 19th century: “All philosophy in the old sense comes to an end. We leave alone the “absolute truth,” which is unattainable on this path and for each individual person, and instead we rush in pursuit of relative truths that are achievable for us along the path of positive sciences and the generalization of their results with the help of dialectical thinking” (3: 6, 292).
In Engels’ letters of the 1990s, there also appears the assertion that the spheres of ideology do indeed possess a certain independence and can act as special factors in historical development: “although the material conditions of existence are primum agens
[41] , this does not exclude the fact that ideological spheres, in turn, exert a reverse, but secondary, influence on these material conditions” (3: 6, 509). Such statements by Engels deprived the critical conclusions of Marxist theory of strict unambiguity and led to a confused idea of the “interaction” of various factors in history.
Not only for Engels, but also for all subsequent Marxists, Marx’s theory was “not a dogma”, but above all a guide to one’s own theoretical conclusions. In general, two main directions can be distinguished along which Marxist theory evolved in subsequent years. The first direction is associated with political movements oriented toward practical social transformations and operating within the framework of certain parties of Marxist orientation. Within this direction, the reformist and revolutionary wings of Marxists stand out sharply; among the former, we can mention K. Kautsky and E. Bernstein, representatives of German social democracy, who are opposed by supporters of revolutionary transformations in the persons of K. Liebknecht and R. Luxemburg. In the Russian socialist movement, a similar split in Marxism is represented, on the one hand, by G. V. Plekhanov, on the other hand, by V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) and L. D. Bronstein (Trotsky). The second direction of the evolution of Marxism is associated with the development of sociological and philosophical theories by various theorists in the West, who treated Marxism primarily as a theory, rather than a political movement. In this regard, Marxism exerted a very powerful influence on Western social and philosophical thought. Most philosophical concepts of the 20th century in the West were influenced by Marxism in one way or another. Unique interpretations of Marxist theory were developed within the framework of the Budapest School (D. Lukacs, A. Heller), the Belgrade School (G. Petrovic, M. Markovic, S. Stojanovic), and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in Germany. Representatives of the Frankfurt School include its founders M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, as well as its graduates G. Marcuse, E. Fromm, and J. Habermas.
Literature
1. Marx K., Engels F. Works. 2nd ed. M., 1955-1974.
2. Marx K. Capital. T. 1-3. M., 1983-88.
3. Marx K., Engels F. Selected Works: In 9 volumes. Moscow, 1985.
4. Marxist philosophy in the 19th century. Moscow, 1977.
5. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA).
6. Vazyulin V. A. The Logic of K. Marx’s Capital. Moscow, 1968.
7. Ilyenkov E. V. Dialectics of the abstract and the concrete in Marx’s Capital. Moscow, 1960.
8. Sandküler G. J. Criticism and positive science. Towards the evolution of Marx’s theory // Historical and philosophical yearbook. 1990. Moscow, 1991. P. 6-25.
9. Lenin V. I. Philosophical Notebooks. Moscow, 1978.
Mamardashvili M. K. Analysis of Consciousness in the Works of Marx // Questions of Philosophy. 1969, No. 6.
10. Oizerman T. I. Formation of the Philosophy of Marxism. Moscow, 1986.
11. Selivanov Yu. R. Phenomenology of the alienated spirit. Moscow, 1999.