In my view, while Marx's work before the mid-1850s focuses
on a socio-historical theory of knowledge, which necessarily
removes Philosophy from its privileged place in a hierarchy of
knowledges, Marx's remarks in later life (see his conversations
with Alexei Voden and Liebknecht's reminiscences) make it clear
he saw a continuing role for the study of philosophy and rejected
the positivist and empiricist use of scientism as a worldview.
Even Darwinism was critiqued for its bourgeois anthropomorphizing
of animal life, and the elevation of atheist free-thinking into a
secular form of proselytizing was dismissed as no better than
Old Testament dogma.
In his economics of 1857-1867 the critique of ideology is
transformed into the critique of bourgeois civil society and
its mode of production, and epistemic errors are located
within the relations of production rather than simply in
the superstructure. Reification and Personification are
seen as systemic impediments to knowledge rooted in
everyday practice, not just in the ideas of bourgeois
commentators.
Incidentally, Marx never "contributed a chapter to Anti-Duehring."
He had written a journal article on Duerhing, which he allowed
Engels to incorporate into his book, published serially at first
without much attention. Despite Engels' comments much
later that Marx approved the book, there is no indication that
the dialectics Engels speculated about there had any relevance
to the dialectics of praxis that Marx employed in his critique
of political economy.
hose interested in the issue of Naturdialectik or what has
been known since Plekhanov as "Dialectical Materialism'
may want to read my paper on 'Marx's Ecology:
Synthesizing Dialectics of Praxis and Nature" at
http://www.egroups.com/files/red-green/
To read it, you'll have to subscribe to the moderated,
very low-volume Red/Green list, which can be done
by clicking on the 'Subscribe' button.
-Walt Sheasby
In a message dated 5/23/00 7:35:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
<< A credible case can be made that Marx
consciously rehjected philosophy and philosophical bases, regarding them as
mere ideology, and saw the materialist concetion of history as a partial
substitute, preserving what might be valuable in philosophy while explaining
why it was ideology. See Daniel Brudney's excellent recent book, Marx's
Attempt to Escape Philosophy. One might debate, of courese, how successful
was Marx's attempt to escape philosophy.
Btw Engels, who is also responsible to a lot of what is called materialist
dialectics as philosophy, with a certain degree of approval by and even
participation from Marx, who contributed a chapter to Anti-Duehring, takes
the Brudney line in a manner os speaking in his piece Ludwif Fuerback and
the
End of Classical German Philosophy.
--jks
>>
