What did Marx mean when he said he "stood Hegel on his head" ?

[Laughing Coyote]

13. This assumes that you know your premises

Last edited Fri Feb 11, 2022, 04:51 PM - Edit history (1)

This involves a Cartesian dualism implied in the word dialectic, whose etymology means across or between things which are gathered or selected, and thus predicating on what is gathered or selected as significant. This implies exclusion of other possibilities in the things not gathered or selected.

A good example is of how this limitation has dogged Marxism is the manner that Hegelian categories of historical development are assumed not just to be valid as Hegel used them, which itself has been demonstrated by anthropology and historical investigation to be false, but are said to be determining human history universally. There is assumption among many Marxists, including a Nepali communist who recently sent me his paper, that all history everywhere necessarily follows a path of primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism because their internal movement and contradictions require singular outcomes. But a growing body of ethnographic research and more extensive study of history show these fundamental premises as being incomplete or wrong, leading consequently to fallacious conclusions.

Marx, for example, described intellectuals as always serving in the interest of other classes and not having their own class interest. Thereby in revolutionary settings intellectuals describing themselves as serving in the interest of working class as its "vanguard" can erect highly centralized bureaucratic states that serve primarily their interests and more specifically those of its party chiefs, yet call them workers' states. The supposed bourgeois sociologist Max Weber, by not accepting this premise was able to establish in a series of articles in 1918, republished as the 2nd appendix to his Economy and Society, that the ruler of the modern state and its institutions, both state and civil, is the bureaucracy. Calling bureaucratic rule "hierarchic monocracy", he furthermore not only predicted that the emergent Soviet Union would tend towards bureaucratic totalitarianism as intellectuals established power in their role of vanguard of the proletariat but anticipated bad things happening in Germany. Similarly he predicted the dominant role of bureaucracy in all institutions of capitalist states as well, due to the growing complexity accompanying capitalism. Marx himself became aware of the danger of bureaucratic domination as the Leviathan of the bureaucratic imperial state consolidated its power throughout the second half of the 19th century, and thus well before the French revolution of 1870 he had given up the idea the proletariat taking over the state to bring socialism in the form of dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1871 he looked to the example of Parisian workers' councils as alternative. The intellectuals who successfully emerged as leaders following 20th century revolutions, however, subsequently still justified their use of bureaucratic domination in consolidating their power within the party and state in terms of the Marx's discarded dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx himself was always aware of this incompleteness in our abstractions, and thus he continually investigated additional evidence that could revise his original premises. Although he always was optimistic that the working class could establish an equitable society no longer dependent upon a capitalist ruling class, he also was always looking for additional factors that mitigated this possibility and required him to revised his work. This is exemplified in his notebooks accumulated in his last decade in life in which he turned to early ethnology, which unlike Engels he by no means accepted uncritically, and early ecological and agricultural research, to discover alternative ways that humans had and could engage with the world and with each other.

In this way I feel that Marx was less a post-Hegelian than someone who anticipated ideas of the 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who discarded the dualism inherited from late Greek thought while keeping the processual core, which he saw as central to every event in the universe from the smallest to the largest, along with a sense of inter-connectedness of everything in the universe found in early Classical thought but which was discarded in by the later thought that came to dominate the Enlightenment and rise of science. At the time of his writing in the first half of the 20th century Whitehead also was aware that the newly discovered theory of relativity and quantum mechanics changed everything, even if most sciences and society continued to proceed as if these discoveries did not exist. Marx was such a person who would have similarly leaped to understand such new ways of conceiving the universe and their significance in revising his ideas, much in the way that he greeted the work of Darwin. Whitehead's word was not dialectic, but "conscrescence," the coming together, the simultaneous making of subjectivity and objectivity of all things, represented in the events in the ongoing creation of the universe.