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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction.............................................................................................................. 1

Chapter Two: The Birth of the Modern Subject: Bacon and Descartes ........................................ 6

Chapter Three: Immanuel Kant: The High Water Mark of Enlightenment Subjectivity .............. 18

Chapter Four: The Enlightenment Subject as Bourgeois Ideology: Part I .................................. 36

Chapter Five: The Enlightenment Subject as Bourgeois Ideology: Part II ................................. 47

Chapter Six: The Postmodern Challenge: Or, Does Postmodernism Escape Modernism? ........ 74

Chapter Seven: Capturing the Revolutionary Subject: Or the New Humanism .........................92

Chapter Eight: Conclusion..........................................................................................................115

Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 118
 Revolutionary Suicide

By having no family,
I inherited the family of humanity.
By having no possessions,
I have possessed all.
By rejected the love of one,
I received the love of all.
By surrendering my life to the revolution,
I found eternal life.
Revolutionary Suicide.

--Huey P. Newton
 1

Chapter I: Introduction
In the sixth of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Karl Marx writes that a primary mistake made

by his fellow Young Hegelian philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is that, in his critique of Hegel, he

“resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction

inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”1 In this

now famous passage, Marx is assigning equal parts praise and criticism to Feuerbach and

likewise to his Young Hegelian comrades. The idea that the religious essence (God) is none other

than the human essence in fetishized, objectified, and alienated form, is something we know

Marx accepts. After all, religion is the opiate of the people. Yet in Feuerbach’s articulation, he

makes a critical error by merely transferring his idea of essence from one transcendent and

abstract universal (God, religion) to a self-moving abstract “thought entity,” namely, the idea of

“Man.”

Feuerbach never truly moves us beyond Hegel. A problem which nevertheless should be

credited with the tremendous achievement of overcoming Kant’s dualisms and transcendental

idealism, if only to leave us with the burden of the dialectic as a movement of abstract thought

regarded as “truly human life,” while “real man and real nature become mere predicates—

symbols of this esoteric unreal man and of this unreal nature.”2 The worry, therefore, is that we

are always just a step away from falling back into the object vs. transcendental subject dualism

of Kant, where “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form

of…contemplation.”3 Creating a situation where the subject remains a transcendental, universal

abstraction which stands over and above all else.

1
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, ed. by Robert Tucker (London:
WW Norton, 1978), p. 145.
2
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, p. 121.
3
Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach,” p. 143.
 2

So what is the human essence for Marx? Or to put the matter a little differently, what is human

subjectivity? It is the ensemble of the social relations and social individuals. Fleshing out this

idea will be the primary purpose and objective of this thesis. It is clear from the above statement

that Marx, following Hegel, is keen on deconstructing the Enlightenment’s view of a

transcendental sovereign subject while reconstructing it around the idea of a relational, historical,

dialectically moving entity. But the Marxian twist, which in its course also moves us beyond

Hegel, is that Marx resolves the matter not in dialectical categories vis-a-vis thought entities

(ideas), but instead the relations of categories which are enacted through historically developing

human social relations. These are relations that occur with each other (socially) and with nature,

because humans are both social and natural beings. Subjectivity is thus a relation among enacted

universal yet dialectically moving categories, human social individuals, and their particular

historical relations in which each aspect presupposes the others and through which subjectivity,

like humanity itself, undergoes negations, sublations, and changes. All of which occur as

embedded human relations themselves are subject to change.

It is in this way that we can start to think of Hegel and Marx as two of the first

“postmodern” thinkers. If by postmodern we mean thinkers committed to the idea of dialectically

negating and moving beyond the problems of modern Enlightenment thinking. However this

immediately raises the question, how are we differentiating the use of the term postmodern from

its generally acquired use in the philosophical community and its association with thinkers such

as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and others? Our answer is what we might

call deconstruction for the express purposes of reconstruction. In other words, my method

requires an intense focus on the movement of history, the enacted movement of social relations,

embedded lived experience, and dialectic. As Marx writes in the fourth of his “Theses,” “after
 3

the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be

criticised in theory and revolutionised in practice.”4 The subject, like the family, is no different,

and it is our position that this is postmodern thinking’s fatal flaw—that in the midst of

deconstruction it leaves no space for reconstruction.

On the one hand, postmodernism in its usual understanding is philosophically committed

to (various modes of) deconstruction and negation. This has a great deal of appeal and, generally

speaking, is something we accept. But on the other hand, it seems to offer us no method or

opportunity for reconstruction. Put another way, postmodernism seems to foreclose the

possibility of transcendence or a movement beyond what is currently presented to us other than

its annihilation. In dialectical terms, it offers no negation of the negation, no leap to positivity

through the negativity. Therefore, postmodernists merely negate one ahistorical, transcendental

abstraction (the Enlightenment subject) in order to fetishize another, whether that be invisible

power relations, the signifier, simulacra. To do this is to: “Abstract from the historical process,

and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself.”5

The modernist gap between subject and object, universal and particular is never fully

crossed and we therefore fall back into an alienated bourgeois world where that which appears as

representation (phenomena) is cut off from reality as it is (things-in-themselves). Leaving the

situation “hanging” in suspense like this will not do for us. For ultimately, we are not only

interested in the deconstruction and the death of enlightened “Man,” but likewise in his radical

reconstitution and liberation. This is what Marx deems the positive leap from human

“prehistory” to the beginning of real human history proper.6

4
Ibid., p. 144.
5
Ibid., p. 145.
6
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in The Marx Engels Reader: Second Edition, p. 5.
 4

Thus the postmodern negation of Enlightenment thinking has presented us with a

philosophical fork in the road. One path is to take the postmodern route to the extreme, which I

will argue leads to a marriage of postmodernism and neoliberalism which never truly overcomes

Enlightenment modernism. However, the other path, represented in this instance through the

thought of Marx, advocates a new philosophical humanism. A position which in Hegelian-

Marxist terms does in fact achieve a negation of the negation which overcomes Enlightenment

thinking and at the same time moves us beyond the postmodern challenge toward a new positing

of human liberation.

With this in mind, we will proceed in the following way. Overall, there are two primary

aims in this thesis. The first is to deconstruct both the modern Enlightenment and subsequent

postmodern theories of subjectivity. The second is to reconstruct a Hegelian-Marxist theory as a

positive alternative within the realm of what I referenced above as a new humanism. To do this I

will be drawing from a variety of sources and strands of thought, the majority of which fall into

the combined traditions of Hegelian-Marxism, Marxist-Humanism, and first-generation Critical

Theory.

This will include both presenting and grappling with the ideas of thinkers such as:

Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm, Frantz

Fanon, Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, all of whom we will make use of in detail.

The first four chapters are encapsulated within the realm of the modern Enlightenment theories

of the subject. Chapters one and two detail the philosophical rise, articulation, and criticism of

the Enlightenment subject with a particular focus given to the philosophies of René Descartes

and Immanuel Kant. Chapters three and four argue, in Marxian and postmodern terms that the

theories of the subject offered by the Enlightenment are bourgeois in nature and play a primary
 5

role in bourgeois ideology. In chapter five, we turn our attention squarely to the postmodern

challenge to Enlightenment subjectivity generally, with a specific focus given to the thought of

Michel Foucault. Foucault, among others, is representative of the “death of the subject” in

philosophy which gained traction the second half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, we

will grapple with the question: Does postmodern theory truly escape bourgeois modernism? Our

answer is that it ultimately does not, and that in some instances it in fact collapses back into a

modern bourgeois recasting of itself in the form of postmodern neoliberalism so prevalent in our

world today. Finally, in chapter six we posit our own theory: subjectivity rooted in a Hegelian-

Marxist, humanist philosophy of praxis and historical dialectic, which seeks to overcome both

bourgeois Enlightenment and postmodern thinking with the establishment of a new humanism

and revolutionary subjectivity.

 6

Chapter II: Birth of the Modern Subject: Descartes and Bacon

It was against the backdrop of negative free individualism coupled with a historic period

of insecurity that the Modern or Enlightenment7 philosophical subject was “born” in the late 16th

and early 17th centuries. Everything from religion to society to economic life had been cast into

doubt. Seemingly nothing anymore could be known for certain. Least of which, the answer to the

existential questions, “Who am I?” and “What can I be know? What can I be certain about?”

For most of us we tend to regard the French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician René

Descartes as the founder of the modern age of philosophy. It tends to be commonplace to see him

as the person who presented the most mature philosophical embrace of a new age of scientific

rationality, instrumentalism, and individualism, likewise giving philosophical credence to an

emerging modern subject by articulating an answer to the very real questions of existential crisis

mentioned above. I do not wish to challenge this commonly held opinion, and for the most part I

feel it is more than sufficiently accurate. However, before turning to Descartes, his theory of the

subject, and its effects, it should be important to point out that he did have his precursors.

Perhaps the greatest of these was the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon.

To give a complete account of Bacon’s philosophical position or to offer a detailed comparison

and contrast between his philosophy and that of Descartes is beyond the scope of this thesis. For

our purposes, all we wish to accomplish is to see how Bacon embraced what we might call the

“modern turn” toward the kind of thinking outlined above and at the very least laid something of

a foundation on which Descartes eventually built. Bacon tells us in Book I of his work New

Organon that, “Man, being servant and interpreter of Nature, can only do and understand so

much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature; beyond

7
Throughout this work, I will use the terms modern and Enlightenment interchangeably.
 7

this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”8 He goes on to tell us “that it is by

instruments that the work is done.”9 and that “We must lead men to the particulars

themselves…because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays,

representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.”10

Bacon proposed a radically new way of doing philosophy which had profound implications on

subjectivity.

For Bacon, subject and object, as well as subject and nature, were severed from each

other. Nature was a material world, “out there,” a mechanical collection of individual parts and

facts to be understood and study experimentally. The subject was “in here” (in the mind) and

stood over and above nature, both manipulating it and contemplating it: “Nature to be

commanded must be obeyed.”11 Knowledge and reason were merely tools and instruments which

were bent to the subject’s will or understanding in achieving this task. As Bacon notes, “Human

knowledge and human power meet in one.”12 What Bacon strove for was a systematic and

axiomatic understanding of nature, something which could be known for certain and therefore

provide solid grounding for answering existential questions in an age of uncertainty.

Emerging out of the groundwork laid by the likes of Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo in

science and the turn toward individualism in both religious and social life came the first mature

philosophical articulation of the modern subject, namely that of Descartes. In his work Descartes

and the Enlightenment, Peter Schouls presents Descartes as a no simple gradualist, reformer, or a

person who intended to bring slow evolutionary improvements to stagnant ways of thinking.

8
Francis Bacon, New Organon, in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. by Roger Ariew and
Eric Watkins (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2009), p. 16.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., pp. 18-19.
11
Ibid., p. 17.
12
Ibid.
 8

Rather, Schouls argues Descartes must be taken as a total “revolutionary,” a man who, “intended

to bring a totally new outlook in all areas of life,”13 by rejecting wholesale all previously held

views by establishing a “radical form of epistemic individualism.”14 I share Schouls’ opinion and

presentation of Descartes as a revolutionary rather than a reformer, albeit with one large caveat.

Namely, that Descartes and the Enlightenment project in general represent only a revolution in

retreat—a retreat into the safety of the sovereign, disciplined, individual subject.

As we mentioned above, the 17th century in Europe was a time of crisis, especially on

two fronts. On the one hand, social and religious upheavals had contributed to a new birth of

isolated individualism and a theory of negative freedom (liberty) which broke down many

previously held social, communal, religious, and familial ties. On the other hand, continued

revolutions in science and technology contributed to a disenchantment and alienation of the

individual from nature (a dualism of subject and object) in which nature was viewed in

increasingly mechanistic, instrumental, and rationalized terms. In short the subject was “free” but

alienated and uncertain. She was individual, but an individual who was increasingly isolated and

abstracted. Descartes strove to give philosophical grounding for such a situation, focusing again

on a notion of extreme epistemic individualism: What can I know? Of what can I be certain? By

what method can I come to this? In what way can I (“in here”) be sure of, or understand what is

“out there”? As Kenneth Gergen writes, “To value the self is to value a private, interior

consciousness (‘me,’ ‘here’) in contrast to an exterior world. In effect we, presume the existence

of a psychological world of the self.”15 In this way, as Marx describes, the alienation of nature

becomes complete, because “the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is

13
Peter A. Schouls, Descartes and the Enlightenment (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1989), p. 14.
14
Ibid., p. 13.
15
Kenneth Gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction (London: Sage Publication, 1999), p. 8.
 9

understood only in the form of the object or contemplation; but not as sensuous human

activity.”16

We seem then to have a kind of dualism within a dualism (i.e. a dualism of the subject

within the subject-object dualism). Objects from the “outside world,” i.e., nature confront us (the

isolated “I”, the cogito) as alien forces which, given the Cartesian method and the power of the

subject’s autonomous will and universal reason, must be overcome. Yet these same objects, as

mechanical materials of nature, can never be truly known or truly encountered except only

passively and contemplatively as clear and distinct ideas, in other words as abstract mental

representations. Lukács describes this in the section of History and Class Consciousness entitled

the “Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” as the dualism between “fatalism and volunteerism.”17

In this sense, only that which conforms to the autonomous disciple of reason and method can be

known, but only those clear and distinct ideas (mental representations) fit this criteria. Thus, to

use Marx’s language, to have a rich encounter with “sensuous reality” becomes an irrational

“thing-in-itself” (more to come) set over and against us—hence the fatalism. We are therefore

reduced to the volunteeristic manipulation of purely formal, reified appearances, using the

instrumentalizing power of reason and method. Reason thus becomes something of a colonizer.

As we know, there are numerous working parts to Descartes’ philosophical system; for

example, his rationalism and the role of reason, the importance of his method, and his views on

free will and the unique power he ascribes to it, just to name a few. However the foundation of

his system must be the sovereign and isolated subject—the cogito.18 As Descartes says, it is only

this self-conscious individual which gives any credence or meaning at all to reason, method, or

16
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 143.
17
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1967),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs1.htm. Accessed: 22 January 2016
18
From here on I will use the terms cogito and subject interchangeably.
 10

will. “But then what am I? A thinking thing,” he tells us in the Meditations, “Something that

doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and also senses and has mental images.”19

The subject is therefore for Descartes a self-evident truth. It is the subject for which Descartes

can provide the foundational building blocks of two of the previously mentioned questions of

existential crisis, namely, “Who am I?” and “Of what can I be absolutely certain?” “After having

thought carefully about it…one must then, in conclusion, take as assured that the proposition: I

am, I exist is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind.”20

The process by which Descartes arrives at his isolated subject reveals something in the

nature of the subject itself, specifically with regard to the above mentioned notions of freedom,

reason, and method. Schouls argues that for Descartes, besides the subject itself, the free will

holds primacy over all else.21 Descartes held that for many years prior to his new modern age,

reason and rational thinking had been held in bondage. As we read in Mediation I, “From my

earliest years, I had accepted many false opinions as being true…so that I had to undertake

seriously once in my life to rid myself of all opinions I had adopted up to then.”22 Reason, true

knowledge, and right judgment are thus being held hostage by “bad usage” and “turned from the

right path which can lead it to the knowledge of the truth.”23 Thus reason requires liberation

through method, which in turn can only come about by an act of will based on a sovereign

subject. This method is of course Descartes’ method of doubt under which old opinions were to

be swept completely away and replaced with new ones of certainty, which should be forced by

the subject to conform to a rational scheme.

19
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in Discourse on Method and The Meditations, trans. by F.E.
Sutcliffe (London: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 106-107.
20
Ibid., p. 103.
21
Schouls, p. 40.
22
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 95.
23
Ibid., p. 100.
 11

As we know, this is the method which Descartes employs throughout the Meditations,

denying the existence of everything both in and outside of the world: no sky, no sun, no earth, no

bodies, nothing learned from the senses, no other minds, etc., from which he eventually arrives at

the existence of himself as subject. But what is important to point out is that although Descartes

uses the method to come to himself—his mind—as subject, such a method can only be employed

by the abstract freedom of such a subject in the first place. This is how we are to liberate reason

and establish knowledge and science, through the individual free subject instrumentally imposing

his or her method. As Schouls tells us, “With method and free will combined we have the

condition which allows for the liberation of reason.”24 And for Descartes, what is rational cannot

be so unless dictated by knowledge, and likewise there is no knowledge apart from science.25

For Descartes, this idea can be worked out by the subject (in his case the mind) alone

which is not sullied by the “fluctuating testimony of the senses,” but instead by “an unclouded

and attentive mind,” which produces for us clear ideas, “so readily and distinctly that we are

wholly freed from doubt about that which we understand.”26 For knowledge (and vis-à-vis

science) we must depend on the understanding and our free instrumental deployment of reason

and method alone. This of course disconnects the mind, the subject, from the world itself. It

places it outside the realm of material nature, which now became a meaningless realm of matter

and mechanization, to be at one and the same time contemplated and controlled by the Subject.

This mechanized complex, which could only be grasped representationally through the

understanding of the subject, must be broken down into ideas which are clear, simple, and

distinct. Descartes affirms this for us in his Principles of Philosophy, writing “that which is so

24
Schouls, p. 31.
25
Ibid., p. 19.
26
Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in Descartes: Selections, ed. by Ralph M. Eaton (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), p. 46.
 12

precise and different from all other objects, as to comprehend in itself only what is clear.”27 This

is similar to the complete break, alienation, and disenchantment of nature. Which is transferred

into singular abstract facts to be grasped and disciplined to the isolated individual knower

equipped with a rational scheme.

Descartes’ dualism, as Marx and Engels tell us in The Holy Family, “completely

separate[s] his physics from his metaphysics,” leaving disembodied subject/mind on the one

hand and, “matter…[as]…the only substance,”28 on the other, a situation which Marx refers to in

this text as “mechanical materialism” but also elsewhere as “vulgar” materialism. In this way,

Descartes takes an epistemological distinction (i.e. how can a subject know something about the

world?) and turns in into an ontological problem by positing the sovereign and universal, subject

on the one side and mindless, mechanical matter on the other. Marx and Engels are critical of

this because it not only perpetrates a complete break with the subject and object, but also leaves

us with a strange peculiarity in which the subject both dominates over and attempts to master and

control objects of nature with all the efficiency a of Georgia cotton plantation owner, while at the

same time it is reduced to the status of a passive observer of the very same objects, concerning

which it needs to formulate the proper mental representations.

Underpinning and running parallel to this alienating dualism is what Marx calls the

division of mental and manual labor, or the severing of theory and practice which comes from

having a sovereign yet isolated subject thrown against the forces of nature. It is of little surprise

then that Cartesian dualism tracks social dualism of the real division of labor in human social

relations. “With the division of labor—the most monstrous of which is the division between

27
Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Method, Meditations, and Philosophy of Descartes, trans. by John
Veitch (New York: M Walter Dunne, Publisher, 1901), pp. 317-318.
28
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Holy Family, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 150.
 13

mental and manual labor—class societies arose,” a situation which Raya Dunayevskaya rightly

notes in her work Marxism and Freedom. “The separation of physical and intellectual labor

stands in the way of man’s full development…It [labor] ceases to be ‘the first necessity of living’

and has become a mere means of life.”29 This dualism tracks Descartes’ retreat into the lofty

abstraction of his subject, which of course cannot but be alienated and disenchanted from her

world, because all she knows are her own private experiences. As Dunayevskaya writes, “the

productive forces seem to develop independently of him,”30 and confront him as mechanized

laws rather than as social relations.

In many respects Descartes both reifies and fetishizes the subject; it ascends into the

clouds of heaven as a kind of abstract universal, which is a by-product of his mistaking

epistemological problems31 for ontological problems and his subsequent ontological dualism of

subject and object,32 with the free, rational, judging subject on the one hand and mechanical

nature on the other. Andy Blunden writes, “Descartes’ mistake was to extend the idea of his own

consciousness as something immediately give to him, to everyone else’s consciousness…Thus

transforming an epistemological category into an ontological category.”33 In this regard, the

subject has seemingly left the theater of action altogether and retreated to the comforts of its own

consciousness without ever venturing into the world of nature.34 This is in essence what we

mean by the abstract universality of the subject, but perhaps a better term might be general

individualism in that this supposed universal is more or less a collection of individuals with a

29
Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), p.
104.
30
Ibid.
31
i.e., how do I, the subject, know something outside of me, the object
32
By ontological dualism we are referring to Descartes’ substance dualism. The res cogitans and the res extensa.
33
Andy Blunden, Concepts: A Critical Approach (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), p. 92.
34
With Descartes of course, quite literally, “God only knows” how we bridge this gap.
 14

general attribute. As Hegel writes, “When one understands by the universal, that which is

common to several individuals, one is starting from the indifferent subsistence of these

individuals and confounding the immediacy of being with the determination of the Notion.”35

We hope to bear this idea out in much greater detail in subsequent chapters, but for now, suffice

it to say that for Hegel and Marx a subject is not an abstract ‘thing’ that has attributes, but is

instead a particular dialectical relation between a universal and an individual which is both

objective and subjective. To place the subject ontologically beyond all history and society leads

to making it something of a fetish of common sense, lauding over all posterity as if it were a

natural law.

Therefore it is not human beings, human persons, who take on subjectivity on a Cartesian

account, but the other way around. Marx, in the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right,” offers a political example of this strange peculiarity, where he argues that

“the heaven of generality” is set “over against the earthly existence of its actuality,” and in which

the State “makes man the subjectified State”36; in short, a forced, alienating dualism rather than

dialectical unity. This presents us then with a serious ideological concern, in which we have an

inversion away from the human being and toward a disembodied substance-subject. As Marx

writes in the first volume of Capital, it is “a product of the human brain which appears as

autonomous figures.”37 Thus we have a situation, in which the subject appears, “Not as a historic

35
G.W.F Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. by A.V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1969), p. 621.
36
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition,
p. 17.
37
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 165.
 15

result [of social relations] but as histories point of departure. As the Natural Individual

appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature.”38

This division of theory and practice, as Dunayevskaya observes, coupled with the

ontologically detached subject, which as Paul Connerton claims is “ideological because it fails to

recognize the precondition for its own existence,”39 and Descartes’ own description of the

subjective desire for individual mastery over nature and the liberation from the its “irrational”

bondage (which only the separated Subject is capable of) tends toward the individual subject as

cold manipulator of passively received alienated objects which need to be controlled. As we have

argued previously, for Descartes (like Bacon before him) knowledge, power, science, mastery,

and liberty are all connected with each other and all are attributes of the sovereign subject and

discipline to method. “I understand by the sole power of judgment which resides in my mind,

what I believed I saw with my eyes,”40 Descartes writes in Meditation II, and if I “Tighten the

reign gently and opportunely, we shall the more easily be able to govern and control it.”41

This kind of methodical, calculating, rational, and disciplined freedom is what Schouls

refers to in Descartes as the “liberty of indifference,”42 and in this sense is a negative form of

liberty in that its sole purpose is the removal of obstacles for domination. The more knowledge

(i.e. scientific knowledge) one can obtain, the more power one has, the more one can assert

mastery over self and the object of one’s knowledge or that which opposes me--alienated

nature.43 Knowledge, inquiry, reason, etc. are for Descartes not ends in themselves but

38
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Martin Nicolaus (London:
Penguin Books, 1973), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm. Accessed: 30
January 2016.
39
Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), p. 32.
40
Descartes, Meditations, p. 110.
41
Ibid., p. 108.
42
Schouls, p. 101.
43
Ibid.
 16

instruments for purposes of achieving prediction and control. They are to serve the cause of

mastery, the desire that rules all desires. As Schouls puts it, “I seek out and submit myself to the

truth. Reason serves the passion for dominion; scientific knowledge is the instrument which is to

make me master…It is my will, my profoundest desire that I truly be master.”44

Lastly, a question that needs to be addressed as we close this chapter and transition to the

next is, “So what?”. In other words, why is the theory of the Subject advocated and defended by

Descartes “bad” or “wrong”? Obviously, there are implicit ethical considerations laced through

the series of the claims made here, as there always should be when one is advocating a Marxian

critique. In a Marxian critique, the concluding implications should always be directed toward

human emancipation, an end to human alienation, and the birth of a truly different society.

However, to make an explicit normative leap with regards to the positions taken here would

certainly be hasty. In large part, this has to do with the power of the Enlightenment argument,

first encountered in mature form in the philosophy of Descartes. Nobody is going to deny that we

have a faculty of understanding; that we have, use, and make judgments about states of affairs in

the world; and that we generally do so with an eye toward some semblance of reason, method,

and/or discipline. All of this seems to be correct.

The problem, which we have discussed here and will expand upon in greater detail in

subsequent chapters, is the complete severing of the subject from object, mind from nature, and

the Enlightenment’s wholesale retreat from the theater of action, social relations, and holistically

lived embodied experiences, instead preferring a collapse into an ahistorical, asocial, atomistic,

and individualist subject. The subject thus ceases in any meaningful way to be a relational,

connected, embodied, and embedded being, and the world around it (including other people)

44
Ibid., p. 103.
 17

become merely alienated, disenchanted objects confronting it. Therefore reason, understanding,

method, etc. becomes mere instruments for “scientific knowledge,” which is to say the

disciplined mastery and control of “appearances.” As James Marsh writes in his work Critique,

Action, and Liberation, “Such a bourgeois self manifests itself in the realities and ideologies of

reification, individualism, and scientism,” which is “to experience being transformed from social

individual to rugged individual, and self-conscious person to scientific object…the more I have,

the more I am…Such a philosophy becomes only the uncritical reflection of the status quo.”45

The modern subject thus gives philosophical and ideological credence to the social relations of

bourgeois society, relations which of course it can never truly know, because to do so requires

the subject to move beyond the realm of representations and appearances, which it cannot do. As

Max Horheimer notes, “the real situations in which science is put to use, and the purposes which

it is made to serve are all regarded by science as external to itself.”46 And as Connerton further

explains, they, “cannot understand the productive process within which their activities are

embedded.” They “believe they are acting according to personal determinations…but [they]

exemplify the working of an incalculable social mechanism.”47

45
James Marsh, Critique, Action, and Liberation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 7-8.
46
Max Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie, ed. by A. Schmidt (Frankfurt, 1968), p 192.
47
Connerton, p. 33. In the quotation, Connerton uses the phrase “incalculable social mechanism.” In later
chapters, this mechanism turns out to be what, in Marxian terms, is called the law of value. This law, however,
should not be viewed as incalculable in itself. It is only incalculable to the Enlightenment philosophic view, which is
what I take Connerton to be saying here.
 18

Chapter III: Immanuel Kant, The High Water Mark of Enlightenment Subjectivity

I think it is fair to say that in many respects, Immanuel Kant represents the most

articulate and detailed refinement of the Cartesian position which by his time had been roughly

150 years in the making. If Descartes is credited with planting the modern philosophical seed

which eventually blossomed into the tree of Enlightenment, then (to continue the analogy) Kant

should rightly be considered the chief cultivator of that seed for the classical modern period.48

Stating this, however, should not be construed as making Kant into a full fledge Cartesian or that

Kant must be approached as nothing more than a follower of Descartes. We should be fully

aware that there are differences, nuances, and points of departure between them and each

deserves to stand alone and be treated as his own thinker.

That being said, and for the purposes of this paper, Kant does in fact seek to maintain,

extend, develop, and to a certain extent save a great deal of the Cartesian project previously

discussed. Much like Descartes, Kant was deeply interested and influenced by the ideas of

methodical, scientific mastery, and instrumental rationality. Kant writes, “If we turn away from

that fundamental principle [of scientific rationality] we have then before us a nature…no longer

conformable to law; and the cheerless gloom of chance takes the place of the guiding light of

reason.”49 Like Descartes, the freedom of the individual will over nature and the methodical

discipline of the understanding play perhaps the most crucial role in his entire philosophical

position in general. Schouls notes this, stating “Kant and Descartes are really quite close in spirit

in this crucial respect.”50

48
For our purposes, “classical modern philoophy” is referring to the historical period starting with Descartes and
ending with Kant.
49
Immanuel Kant, Principles of Politics, trans. by William Hastie (1891), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/358.
Accessed: 17 March 2016.
50
Schouls, p. 137.
 19

This statement may come as something of a surprise. After all, Kant is the founder the

famous “Critical Philosophy,” a philosophy whose cornerstone is the criticism of what he saw as

the speculative, dogmatic kinds of pure rationalist thinking which Descartes and his followers

made famous, while at the same time attempting to place hard and fast restrictions on what

exactly human beings could ever fully know.51 But Theodor Adorno, in his lecture series Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason, argues that Kant’s critique should not be read as an attempt to do away

with the modern project but is instead its saving grace. Adorno writes “The thrust of Kant’s

philosophy as a whole—and that includes the really critical work, namely the Critique of Pure

Reason is aimed at salvaging…He wishes to salvage specific fundamental spiritual realities that

can be said to be valid for all time and that are secure from the vicissitudes of history.”52 Kant

himself tells us in the preface to the second edition to Critique of Pure Reason,53 (CPR hereafter)

that his criticism “Is the necessary preparation for a thoroughly grounded metaphysics…as a

science.”54 Immediately we see here the connection between the Kantian and Cartesian projects

as Enlightenment projects, specifically in the way of discipline, mastery, science.

But what are the “fundamental spiritual realities” referred to us by Adorno which Kant is

attempting to save? They are pure concepts, categories, and intuitions of the individual

understanding. Which are for Kant a priori instrumental tools of method and discipline which

can guarantee for us certain scientific knowledge. As John McCumber states “The most

comprehensive question of theoretical philosophy for Kant is ‘what can I know?’”55 We find

51
We see this most clearly in religious and theological matters, where Cartesian rationalists claimed knowledge of
God simply by method of pure reason.
52
Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Rodney Livingstone
(Sanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 85.
53
From hereafter, I will refer to this text as CPR
54
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.
32.
55
John McCumber, Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014),
p.44. Emphasis added.
 20

Patricia Kitcher making an analogous statements (i.e. analogous to the Cartesian modernist

program) in her essay, “Kant’s Real Self,” in which she argues, along with certain individualist

knowledge and mastery of nature, Kant’s program is that we “possess the freedom required for

morality,” against alien mechanical nature, and thus, “Kant identifies the real self whose moral

status and future life are in question with the thinking self.”56

This I is, for Kant, the transcendental subject. Which is to say, the a priori, ahistorical,

asocial, and dualistic subject which is both the foundation of and imposition over nature. This

subject, Adorno argues, “is absolutely indispensable to the Kantian critique.”57 For us, in short,

the notion of the subject is that which is most important for Kant to maintain, because it is the

subject’s transcendental unity of apperception which makes all else possible. He writes,

“Man…who knows all the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also through

pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard as

impressions of the senses.”58 The major idea being, that “Man” (i.e., our true selves) is never

manifested in sensuous nature, but is and remains detached and transcendental. It is known

purely as an internal representation or image. Kant had already offered this notion to us earlier

in “Paralogisms of Pure Reason” section of CPR, in which he argued:

Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental
subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart
from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any
judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation. 59

Although CPR is where we find Kant’s theory of the subject, the place where we find the

best example of Kant’s effort to correct, save, and preserve modernism in general is his essay,

56
Patricia Kitcher, “Kant’s Real Self,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. by Allen W. Wood (Ithica, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1984), p.122.
57
Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 90.
58
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 472.
59
Ibid., p. 331.
 21

“Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” There he writes, “Enlightenment is man’s

release from self-incurred tutelage…self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack

of reason but in the lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another…To

give up enlightenment altogether…is to violate and to trample upon the sacred rights of man.”60

When taken in concert with CPR, we see Kant’s desire to preserve, move beyond, and further

concretize the modern position. For us this means passing from the Cartesian Subject of

ontologically simple, “mind” or “soul substance” to the purely logical and noumenal

transcendental subject. There is a connection that might be made here between the passing from

the Cartesian-Modern to the Kantian-Modern subject to the passing from “being” to “essence” in

Hegel’s Science of Logic. Although he mentions this only implicitly (i.e. he never mentions

Descartes or Kant by name) Stavaros Tombazos points out in Time in Marx, that “The doctrine

of being is characterized by the illusory will of the subject…who wants at all costs to discover in

the object that which can only exist in the subjects demands to this object.”61 While the doctrine

of essence, on the other hand, while preserving these initial moments also supersedes them by

giving the subject “a more active role.” And “asks the object questions in such a way as to obtain

coherent answers complying with the requirements of reason.”62

Although the subject plays perhaps the most crucial role in Kant’s entire philosophical

corpus, it is in CPR itself and the subsequent texts on ethics where we find Kant’s most detailed

defense of modern subjectivity. In this we follow the advice of Kitcher, who argues that CPR

should be seen as a prolegomena to the later ethical works, in that it seeks to establish a

grounding for the kind of self/subject capable of carrying out the kind of Enlightenment project

60
Kant, “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html. Accessed: 3 February 2016.
61
Stavaros Tombazos, Time in Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 72.
62
Ibid.
 22

(i.e freedom, morality, science, progress, etc.) we find more explicitly laid out in later texts. We

now shift into some details into ‘who’ and/or ‘what’ Kant’s subject is insofar as it relates to the

overall critique and negation of the modern subject as a whole.

In CPR, we see Kant embracing the kind of subjective turn and individualist dualism of

subject and object of the Cartesian paradigm. He writes, “Since, then, the receptivity of the

subject, its capacity to be affected by objects, must necessarily precede all intuitions of these

objects, It can readily be understood how the form of all appearances can be given prior to all

actual perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori.”63 Any and all appearances, then are to

conform to a subject’s conception and/or categorization of them by way of a transcendental,

ahistorical, and instrumental subsumption under the understanding (i.e. the faculty of reason). In

short, it seems much like Descartes—the attempt to force alien nature conform to laws of

instrumental rationality. Hegel remarks here that these, “special forms of the a priori

element[s]…in spite of [their] objectivity [are] looked upon as a purely subjective act…[then]

present themselves as follows in a systematic order.”64 My emphasis underscores the

voluntaristic and purely subjective nature of the imposition of order on representational or

“imagistic” appearances. The objectivity is such that it is not objective at all, or it is only insofar

as it is universally subjective—it inheres as a property of each abstract individual. In the

Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel rightly criticizes Kant’s attempt at this pure introspection in the

misconception of “already knowing before you know,”65 a knowledge invested with a kind of

subjective universality and certainty of which the subject is the source and from which there is

63
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 71.
64
Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. by Williams Wallace
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/sl_iv.htm.
Accessed: 7 February 2016. Emphasis added.
65
Ibid., https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/sl_iv.htm
 23

no escape. It is in this sense that Horkheimer and Adorno accuse the Enlightenment of

mythologizing its own eradication of myth, or by making it universally instrumental, turning

reason into the irrational. “It is a society ruled by equivalence [i.e. by pure quantity] It makes the

dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities,” they write. “To the Enlightenment,

that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”66

This is the thrust of what Kant famously called his Copernican Revolution in philosophy.

Which is the idea that “objects must conform to our knowledge”67 and that understanding has the

function of “prescribing laws to nature, and even of making nature possible.”68 In this sense,

Kant has engaged in a kind of deconstruction of Descartes for the purposes of reconstruction.

Kant does away with the Cartesian res cogitans in favor of a transcendental/logical subject of

pure form. In doing so, he eschews the Cartesian question of how my ideas of objects in the

world, or how my perceiving of these things with my mind’s eye, actually matches with the

world (i.e for Descartes, through clear and distinct ideas) and instead asks how such objects are

subordinated to purely formal understanding. This is what represents the radical new twist given

to us by Kant. No longer are we following real objects in the world, but instead we are forcing

whatever is ‘out there’ to conform and/or be reduced. If it cannot then it is simply a remainder, a

thing in itself.

In Part I of CPR (The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements) Kant seeks to answer the

question, “How, then, can there exist in the mind an outer intuition which precedes the objects

themselves, and in which the concept of these objects can be determined a priori?” He answers

66
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
67
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 22.
68
Ibid., p. 170.
 24

“Manifestly, not otherwise than in so far as the intuition has its seat in the subject only…”69 This

line tells us something we need to know about the Kantian subject, namely that it is not so much

concerned with ‘objects’ which are alien to it, but rather ‘anterior intuitions.’ In other words

appearances and/or mental representations which are the sole product of the subject, on which

knowledge of them also depends. Like the Cartesian subject, this subject is a necessary

precondition, which, instead of being an intimate and dynamic dialectic with nature, stands

above and manipulates nature into synthesis.

In order to accomplish his task, Kant, following Aristotle two millennia before him,

introduces a table of categories or concepts, which he deems as “pure concepts of the

understanding” to which the entirety of the alien manifold of appearances are made to rationally

conform. It is important to stress that by “appearances” we do not mean objects as they are “in

themselves,” but only as they are as images or representations presented to understanding

through the subjective filters. These subjective filters or pure intuitions are space and time,

through which sensations must pass if we are to be allowed to form representations. Kant’s

twelve categories, which fall under the four divisions of quantity, quality, relation, and

modality,70 are the prerequisites for anything we are able to know. They reside solely in the

transcendental individual as constituents of an a priori method of the mind, a method which,

“concerns itself with the laws of understanding and of reason,” Kant states, “Solely insofar as

they relate a priori.”71

These categories are said to provide the formal characteristics of appearances of any

object whatsoever, in the sense that objects are not known to us as they are, but only as they

69
Ibid., p. 70.
70
Ibid., p. 113.
71
Ibid., p.97.
 25

appear, and they can only appear as conceptual representations. Kant states they are “[the]

concept of an object in general,”72 which guided by the faculty of reason, as Evald Ilyenkov

writes, yield for us not knowledge of the world but “knowledge as contained in general formulas,

instructions, and propositions, and the other thing is the unstructured chaos of phenomena as

given in perception. If this were so, then we could clearly try to formulate rules for making this

correlation, and also to enumerate and classify typical errors so that we could warn ahead of time

how to avoid them.”73

The categories, then, are to provide the understanding with images of objects, or

transform them into representations which can then be strung together and/or compared for the

purposes of judgment. They act as mediators between subject and object. Yet, because of their a

priori and transcendental nature, in which they are not dynamically relational between human

subjects and nature itself, but remain locked up, so to speak, in the consciousness of an

ahistorical subject. They retain nothing but a purely formal and abstract nature rather than

achieving a unity of abstract and concrete which can only come dialectically. Ilyenkov writes in

Dialectic of Abstract and Concrete, “This synthesis or combining of definitions in the concept

(that is, the concreteness of the concept) naturally cannot be simply oriented at the sensually

given,” but “this synthesis must be based on another principle, the ability to combine definitions

a priori… The concreteness of a concept…is thereby explained and deduced by Kant from the

nature of human consciousness which allegedly possesses original unity, the transcendental unity

72
Ibid., p. 149.
73
Ilyenkov, “Activity and Knowledge,” in E. V. Ilyenkov, Philosophy and Culture, trans. by Peter Moxhay (Moscow:
Politizdat, 1991), https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htm. Accessed: 7 February
2016.
 26

of apperception.”74 This transcendental unity of apperception is where we find Kant’s

transcendental subject.

It is the transcendental subject, through the instrumentalization of reason and its

categories of the understanding, which holds and binds the manifold of representations together

into a further abstracted but unified one. Kant tells us in CPR, “For it is an act of spontaneity of

the faculty of representation; and since this faculty, to distinguish it from sensibility, must be

entitled understanding… an act of the understanding.” He continues, arguing “To this act the

general title ‘synthesis’ may be assigned, as indicating that we cannot represent to ourselves

anything as combined in the object which we have not ourselves previously combined… Being

an act of the self-activity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself.”75 For

Kant this act of synthesizing is accomplished through a process the primary target of which is the

unity of apperception, which in turn points us to the unity of consciousness or the Cartesian

principle of the “I think.” According to my apperceptive ability, or self-attribution of my

representations presented to me by the pure concepts of the understanding must have a necessary

unity, continuity, and oneness to it since I (the subject) am the ground for all representations. To

quote Kant at some length:

It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would
be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the
representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me…All the manifold of intuition has,
therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. But this
representation is an act of spontaneity…I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical
apperception…because it is that self-consciousness which, while generating the representation ‘I think’
…cannot itself be accompanied by a further representation. The unity of apperception I likewise entitle the
transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori knowledge arising
from it.76

74
Ilyenkov, “From the History of the Concepts of the Abstract and the Concrete,” in Dialectic of Abstract and
Concrete, trans. by Sergei Kuzyakov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1b.htm. Accessed: 7 February 2016.
75
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 151-152.
76
Ibid., pp. 152-153. Emphasis regarding the italicizing of the word ‘representations’ added. All other emphasis is
Kant’s original.
 27

It seems thus that it is the rationality of the a priori categories of the understanding, marshalled

into service by an a priori subject, which for all intents and purposes “makes” our nature. In the

sense that real nature is apart from us and is alien and can only be known as an image or rational

representation. Blunden writes that “The subject for Kant has no particular nature of its own,

other than having access to universal, natural, invariant principles of reason with which to

interpret what is given to the subject in experience.”77

Here we see Kant’s attempts to salvage the Cartesian subject in that he eschews as

dogmatic the Cartesian substance/mind dualism but maintains the idea of “the projection onto

nature by the subjective…referred back to a common denominator, and reduced to the human

subject…the self, once sublimated into the transcendental or logical subject, becomes the

reference point of reason.”78 This is an idea which Hegel rightly criticizes as “subjective

dogmatism” in that the Critical Philosophy perpetually exempts the subject from its own critique.

This, added to the inability to know the world truly as it is makes it nearly impossible to foresee

a situation “in my having my ego and the world in one and the same consciousness, finding

myself again in the world and, conversely, having in my consciousness what is, what has

objectivity.”79 In this way, Kant simply retreats, or escapes, from the Cartesian problem of the

subject’s interaction with the world by separating the empirical Subject, that subject which I can

form phenomenal representations of, from the ‘real’ transcendental subject has ultimate authority

rooted in its power over the understanding, method, and instrumental reason. Kant tells us that

77
Blunden, Concepts, p. 94.
78
Connerton, p. 66.
79
Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. by
William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
https://marxists.anu.edu.au/reference/archive/hegel/works/sp/suconsci.htm. Accessed: 7 February 2016.
 28

“For the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations is in itself diverse

and without relation to the identity of the subject.”80

In other words, what we experience of ourselves as flesh and blood, and also our

embodied and enacted cognitive states are not really our “true selves.” Rather, Kant has placed

the subject outside the realms of history, culture, and society. What for Descartes had been a

material problem, i.e. how processes in the material world entered into my mind, now for Kant

became a merely formal/logical problem of how properties of one system (alienated nature)

could be reproduced as abstract images in another system (the subject). To a certain extent then,

this kind of subject really does create its own reified nature in that there is seemingly no

connection between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ relations because what is ultimately real is what

conforms to the instruments of science and reason, and all that is ultimately allowed to meet that

burden are internal images and representations. What we end up with is what Ilyenkov derisively

confirms as a mere “abstract unity, recorded in consciousness by means of a general term… a

mechanical agglomeration of immutable constituent parts that are linked with each other

only…more or less accidentally.”81 The explicit implication is that we are dealing with a world

divided into two: with the Subject and its scientific/rational system of representations on one

side, and the alien world as it is in itself on the other in which we (subjects) have constructed a

rational image ‘in here’ out a stream of piecemeal sensations from ‘out there’82. Hegel does well

to remind us of this, arguing that Kant has failed, “to distinguish what is still in itself and what is

posited…or as being-for-other. This is a distinction which belongs only to dialectical

80
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 153.
81
Ilyenkov, “The Definition of the Concrete in Marx,” in Dialectic of Abstract and Concrete
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1c.htm.
82
This is Kant’s famous distinction between things as they appear to us and things in themselves, or ‘phenomena’
and ‘noumena’.
 29

development and is unknown to metaphysical philosophizing which also includes the critical

philosophy.”83

We know as well (which was stated above) that the subject itself does not escape this

fate, being divided between the empirical subject of representation, rationalization, and therefore

self-knowledge, and transcendental subject—the purely formal/logical entity which we are

conscious of in terms of our existence but which still remains “in-itself.” Kant tells us this

explicitly in a number of passages from CPR, for example: “In attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we

designate the subject only transcendentally…Without noting in it any quality whatsoever—in

fact, without knowing anything of it either directly or by inference.”84 Much like Descartes, it is

precisely this kind of retreat into an abstract ether of the dominating subject, which Lukács

entitled the “Antinomy of Bourgeois Thought,” and of which Hegel is highly critical because the

subject seems perpetually stuck in dualism between the fatalism of the irrationality of things as

they truly are (things-in-themselves), and an extreme kind of subjective voluntarism, in which,

Nature—[the subject’s] own as well as that of the external world,” Connerton argues, “is given

to the ego as something that has to be fought and conquered.”85

Thus, the dualism between subject and object is not bridged in the least but is

concretized, in that concepts such as reason and rationality, method, etc. become static and

subjectivized tools; merely means of a systematization of rationality and the disciplined

manipulation of objects in conformity with laws. This is something which Hegel points out, that

knowledge is regarded as an instrument and which he later explained in his History of

Philosophy Lectures “as if one could set forth on a search for truth equipped with spears and

83
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 122.
84
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 337.
85
Connerton, p. 67.
 30

clubs.”86 The inability to overcome this dualism, and the subsequent alienation, leads us to a

continuous circle between of freedom and necessity—of transcendental or formal freedom but

empirical necessity as prescribed by laws. As everything which exists in itself is unknowable,

and every phenomenal appearance which is given to us (i.e. every representation filtered through

the a priori categories) is subject to scientific law (including ourselves), our pure practical

reason, or autonomous freedom can only have bearing on inward forms of action—on the active

manipulation of passively received objects constructed into images and representations. Kant

tells us repeatedly that we can never truly know our own freedom and autonomy (as a thing-in-

itself).

In other words, that the idea of a free will that does not conform, or is not disciplined by

some law, is incomprehensible. But since we are dealing within the realm of pure (practical)

reason, these laws must be what he calls “special laws” designated for those beings (humans)

“belonging to the sensible world…[and]…to the intelligible world,” thus, “belonging to both

worlds…”87 The “special law” to which Kant refers is the a priori Categorical Imperative which

is the a priori law which is to direct our freedom and autonomy, in the same way as our

theoretical reason disciplines itself to the a priori and laws of the categories and thus

instrumentalizes them, in so far as we are “restricted to the condition of agreement…to any

purpose which cannot accord with a law which might arise from the will of the passive

subject.”88 Kant then doubles down on this peculiar duality of autonomy as at once passive

contemplation and inner activity, stating that what we gain is an active or free “inner peace”89 of

86
Hegel, History of Philosophy Lectures, trans. by Haldane and Simson, Vol. III (Amherst, NY: Humanities Press,
1963), p. 428.
87
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. by Thomas Kingsmill Abbot (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2004), p.
92.
88
Ibid., p. 93. Emphasis added
89
Ibid.
 31

this inner will, which “already dwells in natural sound understanding.”90 Yet at the same time

this is merely a “negative as regards what can make life pleasant,” and its effect is “respect for

something quite different from life.”91

In Kant’s connecting the use of pure practical reason (i.e. the will, freedom) in tandem

with the understanding, we find a connection between the contradiction of inward transcendental

freedom and outward necessity that forms the crux of the ideological nature of the Enlightenment

subject. According to Kant’s view, pure practical reason is given primacy over theoretical reason

because although both work in an a priori manner theoretical reason first requires affection

passing through the pure intuitions of space and time in order to subsume the data under the

categories for the production of representations. Pure practical reason, on other the hand, “can of

itself determine the will independently of anything empirical.”92 In this respect it is like the

transcendental unity of apperception in that it requires no representation of itself but is instead a

grounding in itself (and also, therefore, in the noumenal realm). Thus, although we may not

claim “knowledge” of it, insofar as true knowledge is scientifically certain knowledge, we are

nevertheless consciously aware of it and aware of our practical (free) use of it. Kant therefore

moves forward, telling us that pure practical reason and the free will are “quite consistent with

those principles and limitations of pure theoretical reason.”93 It is still only “one and the same

reason which…judges [laws] according to a priori principles…even if from the first [theoretical]

perspective its capacity does not extend to establishing certain propositions…as soon as these

90
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmerman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 12.
91
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 93.
92
Ibid., p. 43.
93
Ibid.
 32

propositions are inseparably attached to the practical interest of pure reason, then it must accept

them.”94

With this in mind and given our stress throughout on Kant’s insistence on the dualism

and alienation of the subject from the object we get a picture of reason in its practical and

theoretical sense as something like: The faculty which employs categories as principles, which

means actively (i.e. freely) grasping its role in grounding mediated representations (this being the

role of theoretical reason) and seeing how these themselves are grounded in higher, more

unified, representations and ultimately unconditioned principles, pure practical reason, and the

moral law.95 Kant hints at this in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals when he argues

the Subject acts “…According to the representation of laws, i.e. according to principles, or a

will, since reason is required for the derivation of action from laws…”96

However, because of the ahistorical and transcendental nature of the subject, the freedom

which Kant describes is nothing more than an internal formalism. How so? Because we are still

in an alienated position from nature, from things in themselves, and thus the “external world”

continues to operate as it will—as a fatalistic unknowable necessity—while our transcendental

freedom turns out to be merely a free perspective from whence we can actively judge and

manipulate, in accordance with the law. Thus we are never able to bridge the gap and leave the

world of appearances, and our freedom is therefore formalized in this realm. Here, Hegel

remarks that Kant and his followers each fail to see that, “if infinity is thus set up against

finitude, each is as finite as the other.”97The free and pure practical consciousness of the acting

and rational is split between the self-determining and self-legislating (of the law) but wholly

94
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 129.
95
McCumber, Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, p. 150.
96
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 26.
97
Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. by H.S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 63.
 33

inward and representational reality on the one hand, and the mechanical laws of nature on the

other. This is the position that Lukács articulates in History and Class Consciousness and it is

therefore worth quoting him at some length, in order that we better understand both the

conclusion of the matter and the forward reaching implications. He writes that:

The freedom of the subject which this device [Kant’s ethics] is designed to rescue, is unable, being an
empty freedom, to evade the abyss of fatalism…[It]…is neither able to overcome the…necessity of the
system of knowledge and the soullessness of the fatalistically conceived laws of nature, nor is it able to
give them any meaning. And likewise the contents produced by reason, and the world acknowledged by
reason are just as little able to fill the purely formal determinants of freedom with a truly living life…. The
‘eternal, iron’ regularity of the processes of nature and the purely inward freedom of individual moral
practice appear at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason as wholly irreconcilable and at the same
time as the unalterable foundations of human existence. 98

We are in a situation where we realize ourselves to be free, but at the same time empty in

our transcendental nature. We are freely self-conscious, but abstractly stoic—our freedom lying

only in a systematic conquest of what appears before us or affects us transcendentally as image.

We must therefore remain agnostic in the ways of true content. This, Marx tells us, is a kind of

perpetual oscillation between “crass materialism” and “crass spiritualism”99 which occurs in the

fact that the subject “wants to do everything, by making the will the causa prima…” yet it

cannot, because it is, for lack of a better term, “stuck” in an asocial and transcendental realm of

representation, where its content must come from that to which it is indifferent to and can,

“prove its existence, therefore, only by shaping and restricting this content.”100 In the

Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes that this kind of freedom in self-conscious form only is

“indifferent to natural existence and has therefore let this equally go free…Freedom in thought

has only pure thought as its truth, a truth lacking the fullness of life. Hence freedom in thought,

too, is only the Notion of freedom, not the living reality of freedom itself.”101

98
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs1.htm.
99
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 25.
100
Ibid. emphasis added.
101
Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 122.
 34

The stark dualisms that plague the Cartesian subject also plague the Kantian subject and

become even more problematic. Kant’s enlightened subject, much like the doctrine or category

of essence in Hegel’s logic is stuck between two contradictory poles, the pole of immediate

existence (i.e. that of immediate objects, ‘out there’) on the one hand and the pole of reflexive

existence (i.e. the imposition of, and reduction to mental representations made by the categories

of the understanding) on the other. Thus we are still, even if in a more refined and meticulous

fashion, presented with a subject-object dualism. Speaking to this, Hegel writes:

It will always stand out as a marvel how the Kantian philosophy recognized the relation of thought to
sensuous reality, beyond which it did not advance, as only a relative relation of mere Appearance, and
perfectly well recognized and enunciated a higher unity of both in the Idea of an intuitive understanding,
and yet stopped short at this relative relation and the assertion that the Notion is and remains utterly
separate from reality…102

The implications of this continued insistence on the separation of the Subject from nature

or reality and the simultaneous retreat into the atomistic subject which, as we quoted previously,

Kant seemed to think represented the human being’s declaration of freedom from “self-incurred

tutelage,” will have strong implications for human subjectivity as it finds itself in the bourgeois

life-world. Such a dualism reflects the reification of “objective” reality (i.e. the reification of

mental representations, as well as social relations) which can only be known as subjective

representations because, as Hegel noted, the Notion for Kant is utterly separated from reality.

The freedom is merely formal, inner freedom of the subject, then, is not one based on freedom in

itself and for itself as Kant would have it, but is instead one of instrumental rationality,

discipline, and methodical calculation and represents what Erich Fromm calls an “escape from

freedom.”

But an escape into what? It is as Hegel describes in the previous quotation as an escape

into itself, into its own atomism, and the empty formalism of its transcendental existence. As

102
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 592.
 35

Fromm says, “Man is free from…but this very freedom leaves him alone and anxious,

overwhelms him with a feeling of his own individual insignificance and powerlessness.” Further,

“This free, isolated individual is crushed by the experience of his individual insignificance.”103

Fromm goes on to tell us that the subject, in its isolation, must strive if at all possible to eradicate

this plague of doubt and insignificance but the bourgeois marketplace makes a great place to

hide. In this respect, the freedom of the subject is, one the one hand, a self-imposed or self-

realized disciplining of oneself to the law, a release from our own tutelage as Kant would have it.

Yet on the other hand it becomes a formally rational and calculating deployment of method

which operates within the disciplined boundaries of law for the purposes of personal

acquisitiveness. And because we know that human subjects are not atomized individuals, we

might call this kind of escape not only into one of ahistorical transcendence but an escape to the

marketplace which is the perfect home for a freedom which is not centered on freedom, but

coercion and manipulation of what appears to the subject as natural necessity—as law. To this

Lukács spells out the implications as follows:

it becomes evident that the man who now emerges must be the individual, egoistic bourgeois isolated
artificially by capitalism and that his consciousness, the source of his activity and knowledge, is an
individual isolated consciousness a la Robinson Crusoe…, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the
inexorable fulfilment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests…But even while ‘acting’ he
remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. 104

Lukács point sets up nicely in our transition to our next discussion.

103
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1965), p. 80.
104
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs1.htm.
 36

Chapter IV: The Enlightenment Subject as Bourgeois Ideology, Part I

“The law…is the judge upon the bench who may pronounce the law till doomsday, but unless
the strong arm of the law, the brutal sheriff, gives effect to the law, it amounts to nothing. True,
the judge can create a sheriff if need be; but he must have one.”105 – Charles Sanders Peirce.

In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels present us with the idea that bourgeois

philosophy106 in general appears as a distorted and inverted world. These philosophic

ideologists,107 they write, have construed matters such that “in all ideology men and their

relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura,” and “this phenomenon arises just as

much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their

physical life process.”108 A side effect is that ideas, categories, and concepts become separated

from their intimate relation to activity. In other words, theory is severed from practice in such a

way that the concepts and categories at play in the world become de-historicized, static, and

rigid. This leads to an occasion in which they become mechanical and disciplined so as to have

the effect of a “common sense” structuring of one’s particular social life-world. Marx and Engels

state that “Once ruling ideas have been separated from ruling individuals, and above all, from the

relations which result…it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas ‘the Idea’…as the

dominant force in history.”109 The universal is severed from both particular and individual, and

they no longer form a dialectical unity but instead a dualism in which the abstract universals

form a priori concepts for maneuver in the world. We might think of these concepts, referring to

105
Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Categories and the Study of Signs,” in Pragmatism and Classical American
Philosophy, ed. by John J. Stuhr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 99.
106
Bourgeois philosophy is used analogously with modern or Enlightenment philosophy.
107
The term ideology is used here and throughout the essay in a negative fashion. For Marx (and us) an ideology is
not merely a neutral worldview or philosophic outlook, it a false, one sided, or obscurant one.
108
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 42.
109
Ibid., p. 69.
 37

the Peirce quotation above, the law, and the Enlightenment subject turns out to be its brutal

sheriff as the law’s chief ideological guarantor.

As we have seen, the modern subject views things through a dualistic lens and “only in

the form of the object,”110or a representation subsumed under a transcendent law which is

likewise subject to manipulation within it, while what is real remains hidden. By abstracting

itself from its own historical unfolding and its own place in the historical drama, the

Enlightenment subject fails to see itself as what Marx terms a “species being,” and therefore

turns its species life, or the life of the subject as a social-historical being, into an individual one.

As Marx wrote in the Manuscripts, “It makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of

the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.”111

One of the most important consequences of this is the nature of a category. As Ilyenkov

points out, Enlightenment subjectivity is faced with a tendency to identify concepts and

categories with a kind of purely formal definition of what it means to be “ideal.” This ideal is

identified solely within the mentality of the individual. Ilyenkov states that with much of

Seventeenth and Eighteenth century philosophy in general, but with Kant in particular, “The

ideal refers to that, and only that, which has a place in the individual mind.” They occur only “in

individual consciousness, in the head of an individual…everything else belongs to the rubric of

the material.”112 As mentioned in previous chapters, they are objectively subjective in the sense

that their objectivity rests on their being universally subjective. In other words, it is a kind of

individualistically self-evident form of common sense. Yet for Kant, because all knowledge

110
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 143.
111
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 75.
112
Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” in Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism, ed. by
Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 31.
 38

must be internally categorical (and thus internally ideal), what counts as material is left

untouched as something else, “something other.”

But for us, Ilyenkov’s definition is exactly the kind of definition we want to give to the

“ideal” and likewise to categories, especially as they relate to Kant’s theory of subjectivity and

my criticisms of it. Therefore concepts like labor, property, and value have a dialectical

movement and “bear a historical imprint.”113 What is most important is that categories undergo

development, contradiction, and negation. However the problem is, as noted above, when they

become detached from their human social relations, they can take on a life of their own. It should

be kept in mind throughout that I am accepting and following both Lukács and Ilyenkov’s

critique of Kant’s theory of the subject (insofar as each author critiques Kant generally on this

point), and using each of them as a background assumption for my own criticism. I am doing so

specifically as it relates to Ilyenkov’s notion of the ideal, Lukács’ criticism of Kant’s dualism

(fatalism-formalism), and how each relates to the Enlightenment subject.

Categories are, as Ilyenkov says (in reference to Marx), “a unity of diverse aspects,”114 an

interaction of all the different aspects and moments of an internally divided whole as it moves

through its various forms of difference and opposition. Marx argues in the Grundrisse that “Even

the most abstract categories, despite their validity—precisely because of their abstractness—for

all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a

product of historical relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these

relations.”115 Marx is following Hegel here, who tells us in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the

object (i.e., the category) “is, as a totality, a syllogism or the movement of the universal through

113
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 273.
114
Ilyenkov, Dialectic of Abstract and Concrete,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1c.htm.
115
Marx, Grundrisse, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm.
 39

determination to an individuality, as also the reverse movement from individuality through

superseded individuality, or through determination, to the universal.”116 The ideas of content and

form, or universality and individuality, are not severed but instead form a real and moving

relationship. The formation is a mediated result in a process of continued specification and

determination. Raya Dunayevskaya points this out when she states that there is no “on the one

hand” and “on the other hand” in this situation, but that the two are “interpenetrated.”117

The difference for Marx, which is what separates him most clearly from Hegel, is that these

relational-historical categories are specifically inherent to human life activity. He states that

“Consciousness is…from the very beginning a social product, and [it] remains so as long as men

exist at all.”118 Categories are therefore the moving intersubjective processes, cultivated and

existing in the space of the life activities (both theoretical and practical) of social individuals.

Ilyenkov notes these activities produce “not only a material but an ideal product…to produce the

act of idealisation of reality…and then having arisen, the ‘ideal’ becomes a critical component of

the material life activity of social man…which constantly closes in ‘on itself’ into more cycles

and spirals.”119

For Marx categories are, to borrow another Peircean term, ideal-reals in the sense that

they exist independently of the subjective mind, not in a Platonic sense, but a communal one.

They are not (in the first instance) detached from human relations but are in fact bound up in

them such that as categories change, human beings themselves change. They do not descend to

us from above, nor do they have a priori existence, but instead they owe their creative debt to

116
Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 480. This passage will have a great impact on our own idea of the
New Humanism presented in the final chapter.
117
Dunayevskaya, “Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes of May 12 and 20, 1953,” in The Power of Negativity, ed. by Kevin
Anderson and Peter Hudis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), p. 17.
118
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 49-50.
119
Ilyenkov, “Dialectic of the Ideal,” p. 36.
 40

human social relations and the communal human consciousness as a group of persons and

inquirers. They can only be detached into an ahistorical transcendental form ideologically, in

which the transcendental subject plays no small role. Hence the reference above to Marx and

Engels’s idea of an inverted world. It is true these categories act as universals, but they are not

empty ideological “thought entities” acting as contemplative filters of surface data. They are

universals whose content is rich with particularity. Socialism, for example, is not merely a

collection of individuals who fit stagnant requirements of some abstract predicates and thus call

themselves “socialists.” It is instead a real movement of praxis, in which the universal category

unfolds itself through its particular manifestations (e.g., Bolshevism) connected to individual

inquirers. Likewise, it is a situation where such a universal is not known foundationally and a

priori, but only through the praxis of individuals. To grasp this historical spiral and drama of the

categories is to be able to grasp the things themselves, not just merely as show themselves (labor,

property, etc.). Marx implores us to “grasp things by the root,” but “for man the root is man

himself.”120 The inability to do this creates the kind of detached subject-object dualism and for

Marx, this is what brings about the kind of detached mysticism known otherwise only to religion.

This is something which the Kantian or Enlightenment subject cannot grasp, because the

historical and social character of these categories is bound up in relations such that they appear to

the Kantian as a thing-in-itself,121 and thus cannot capture the movements, changes, and

especially contradictions which categories undergo.122 Mike Rooke argues in his article

120
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader:
Second Edition, p. 60.
121
For example a “Kantian Subject” cannot “see” or discover the category of abstract labor, because abstract labor
is the socio-historical essence of the appearance of the category of labor in bourgeois society and while the Kantian
Subject deals only with appearances. This inability gives this kind of Subject its ideological flavor.
122
Take the category of labor, for example. In bourgeois society, the single category of labor is split between
abstract and concrete labor within the movement of a single labor process. Abstract labor, as we will see, is the
contradictory “essence” underneath the “appearance” concrete labor. But under for the Bourgeois Subject, we
cannot ‘see’ this abstract labor. We only see what appears as data available for representations.
 41

“Commodity Fetishism and Reification” that the bourgeois subject “employ[s] categories such as

value, money and capital, which are considered not as expressions of human relations ‘tied’ to

things but as the actual characteristics of the things themselves. They come to focus exclusively

on, and study, the ‘natural-technical’ characteristics of these things.”123 This is a phenomenon

which Lukács describes as “the immortality of the categories,”124 which by their means produce

representations that appear on the surface to the subject as self-evident truths or common sense

laws. This is a scenario in which the background horizon of the particular historical life-world

evokes the common cliché, “it is what it is,” creating the circumstances in which subjects do not

“Go beyond the correct calculation of the possible outcome of the sequence of events (the laws

which they find ready-made)…without making the attempt to intervene in the process by

bringing other laws to bear.”125

Marx summarizes this point for us in The Eighteenth Brumaire when he argues that, “The

tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”126 The

inability, therefore, of the Enlightenment subject to grasp the social and dialectical movement of

these categories gives each a reified quality in that they seem to exist either as universal objects

of the subjective understanding or as representations of facts and data. Herbert Marcuse points

this out in Reason and Revolution, arguing that the totality and interconnections and movements

of the social relations are treated “simply as an isolated objective cluster of facts.”127

123
Mike Rooke, “Commodity Fetishism and Reification,” Common Sense. No. 23 (1998),
http://libcom.org/library/commodity-fetishism-and-reification-mike-rooke. Accessed: 22 February 2016.
124
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm
125
Ibid., https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs2.htm.
126
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, p. 241.
127
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Ark Paperbacks, 1964),
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/reason/ch02-4.htm. Accessed: 21 February 2016.
 42

What is the result of this categorical reification? An inverted world. By separating and

objectifying social relations, it gives these social entities a life of their own, turning them on the

one hand into mere disposable predicates of sovereign subjects, or vice versa, it turns subjects

into mere predicates of them. Labor, for example, ceases to be the activity of human self-

realization and instead becomes an alienable object in the civil marketplace which can be

confronted with other objects (money, for instance.) Marcuse goes on to tell us that this process

thereby conceals the origin of itself as a thing in itself and likewise its mechanisms of

perpetuation. He states:

If wages…express the value of labor, exploitation is at best a subjective and personal judgment. If capital
were nothing other than an aggregate of wealth employed in commodity production, then capital would
appear to be the cumulative result of productive skill and diligence. If the creation of profits were the
peculiar quality of utilized capital, such profits might represent a reward for the work of the entrepreneur.
The relation between capital and labor on this basis would involve neither iniquity nor oppression; it would
rather be a purely objective, material relationship… The laws of supply and demand, the fixing of value
and prices, the business cycles, and so on, would be amenable to study as objective laws and facts,
regardless of their effect on human existence. The economic process of society would be a natural process,
and man, with all his needs and desires, would play in it the role of an objective mathematical…subject.128

The marketplaces of circulation and exchange, which for our purposes we might call the

realm of appearances,129 is where the Enlightenment subject finds its most suitable home. As

Lukács points out, this surface plane is precisely where a singular, sovereign subject applies its

universal categories of rationality for the purpose of systematizing the chaotic flux of data that is

the marketplace,130 or as Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Kantian subject’s schemetism is

a “secret [which] has now been unraveled…imposed on the industry by the inertia of a society

128
Ibid.
129
The term ‘appearances’ here (nor anywhere in the text) be thought of in a way that is blatantly false. In
philosophical discourse we have a tendency, I believe, to hastily jump to a conclusion that the term ‘appearances’
always designate the false. With of course, ‘reality’ somehow, somewhere, lurking off in the distance. But here,
although we DO likewise wish to make an appearance-reality distinction, we do so with a grain of salt in that we
are not saying that what appears to us on the surface is somehow patently false, just that it is, so to speak, skin
deep.
130
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs2.htm.
 43

irrational despite all its rationalization,”131 which now conceals itself in subjects seemingly

unending calculation of possibilities.

The marketplace as the realm of appearance, is what Marx describes in “On the Jewish

Question,” as the primary grounding for the rights of “egoistic man, of man separated from other

men and from the community…it is a question of the liberty of an isolated monad, withdrawn

into himself.”132 Here, the primary social tie between people is exchange, a confrontation

between reified categories and alienable objects. The transcendental subject never really has to

enter into the theater of action, per se, because every social relation is mediated by an exchange

relation, or a relation between alienable “things.” Harry Braverman argues in Labor and

Monopoly Capital that, “The social structure, built upon the market, is such that relations

between individuals and social groups do not take place directly…but through the market as

relations of purchase and sale, thus the more social life becomes dense and close network of

interlocked activities…the more atomized they become and the more their contacts with one

another separate them.”133 In short, their subjectivity appears as freer and more sovereign as both

the immediate and apprehendable facts of everyday subjective experience. It is the phenomenal

experience134 of life in bourgeois society.

131
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 98.
132
Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, p. 42.
133
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1998), p. 191.
134
The term experience is perhaps one of the most loaded terms in the history of philosophical discourse. In this
essay we split the term in two, one having a positive and one having a negative connotation. Negatively, we refer
to experience much in the same way Modern philosophy uses the term: inner, subjective, sensational, and
contemplative. Positively, we refer to experience in the manner of several of the post-modern (post-modern
meaning nothing more than antecedent to Modernism) traditions such as Marxism, American Pragmatism, and
Phenomenology use the term: embodied, lived, enriched, and active. In this instance we are referring to
experience negatively.
 44

Marx gives us a good example of this in his description of purchase and sale on the labor market.

He describes it as the “exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham,”135

because subjects there appear as sovereign, self-determined, and are equal before the law. They

enter into relations with each other as self-interested property owners, with their capacity to work

on the one hand and wages on the other, and they (workers) alienate such property on the basis

of a contract. The entire transaction works “either in accord with [a] pre-established harmony of

things, or under the auspices of an omniscient of providence, [and] they all work together to their

mutual advantage.”136 Kant, for his part, has no problem with the arrangement of this surface

appearance, arguing that “Each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he

does not infringe on the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with

the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law.”137

Kant does not explicitly state what this general law is in this particular text. However, I think it

is fair to say that he is referring to the categorical imperative. We remember that the second

formulation of the categorical imperative tells us that human beings are never to treat each other

as means to an end, but as only ends in themselves. We are all equal subjects before the law, in

this case not only the moral law but the law of civil society (i.e., the marketplace) as well.

However as we noted above, due to the dualism of subject from object and the

subsequent “factual” ideality of the categories (Ilyenkov’s argument), the subject herself never

actually enters the game, so to speak, but remains on the sidelines. Only their potential alienable

predicates (labor) or objects of property (money, commodities) ever actually interact. Therefore,

there seems to be no challenge to the categorical imperative, as the objects deals only with other

135
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 208.
136
Ibid.
137
Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory but it Does Not Apply in Practice,’” in Kant: Political
Writings, ed. by H.S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 74.
 45

objects, not people. But even so, the agreement still has the force of contract which in this

instance is the final arbiter. Kant goes on to write that this uniform equality is “perfectly

consistent with the utmost inequality of the mass in the degree of its possessions…or of the

fortuitous property and of the particular rights with respect to others.”138

This is no mere side-effect, but a problem with immense consequences for subjectivity in

general, and for the ideological nature of Enlightenment subjectivity specifically. As

Dunayevskaya argues, “This perverse relation of subject to object is so all-pervading that it has

in its grip the oppressor class.”139 The “fantastic form of appearance of social relations,” appears

as an “exchange of things.”140 Marx adds that this sphere of appearances, the marketplace,

provides the bourgeois Enlightenment subject (the “free trader vulgaris”) with her static and

transcendentally ideal categories and “the standard by which [s]he judges society.”141 But then, a

dialectical movement takes places both with our categories (commodities, labor, capital, money,

etc.) which can only be seen if each is viewed in socio-historic terms. Marx writes, that in the

move from the circulation of commodities to their production, or from appearance to essence,

a certain change takes place…in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was once the money-
owner now strides out front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one
smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has
brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but – a tanning.142

In this excerpt, Marx is pointing out the real movement of subjectivity and the real

movement and interconnections with categories. This is because the categories, as we have

stressed, are nothing more than the “ideal-reals” of human social relations. So, therefore, we see

two social actors, each who appear on the surface as sovereign and transcendental owners of

138
Ibid., p. 75.
139
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 101.
140
Ibid., p. 100.
141
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 280.
142
Ibid. emphasis added.
 46

property, who once the deed is done enter into what Marx calls the “hidden abode” in which

subjects and categories undergo a complete personality adjustment: from free and equal owners

to capitalists and workers—the colonizer and the colonized. But it must be stressed again that

this transformation goes unseen by the “free trader vulgaris,” our enlightened subject.

This is because the bourgeois subject has one foot planted in what it sees as two diametrically

opposed realms: the external world on one side, and the internal transcendental consciousness on

the other. Ilyenkov writes that this idea “gives rise to fetishism of every kind and shade.”143 Both

a fetishism of the external objects and facts simply existing “out there” and the fetishism of

categorical forms as “eternal,” “primordial,” and “absolute.”144They could never even ask, let

alone answer the question which Dunayevskaya poses to us, namely “Why did this content,

labor, assume this form, value?”145 Or to also ask the attaching question, why did these two

supposedly sovereign subjects in the marketplace transform into the form of capitalist and

worker?

To answer would be to challenge something which appears to the bourgeois intellect as

some a “self-evident and nature imposed necessity,”146 in the form of pure and simple facts on

the one hand, and the dogma that concepts and ideality are an “aspect or form of manifestation of

the sphere of consciousness [and] will”147 on the other. This is why Marx implores us to grasp

the matter at its root—to grasp the things themselves. To do so require dynamism, movement,

and relation. This will be our aim in the next chapter.

143
Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” p. 77.
144
Ibid.
145
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 99.
146
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 175.
147
Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” p. 76.
 47

Chapter V: The Enlightenment Subject as Bourgeois Ideology Part II

“I remember watches. They measure time in seconds, minutes, hours. They measure time exactly,
coldly.” – Sherman Alexie148

In the preceding chapter, we left off with Marx asking us to follow him away from the

bourgeois Enlightenment subject as it appears on the surface (i.e., in the realm of the innate

rights of “Man”) and into the hidden abode, where the ideology of this incarnation of the subject

will be laid bare. In this chapter I will spell this out in greater detail. Before I do so, however, we

should briefly restate our primary argument from the previous discussion in order to more easily

keep it in mind as we proceed.

It is our view that the Enlightenment subject acts as the ideological guarantor of current

bourgeois society. Our fundamental reason for this has to do with its dualistic nature of severing

subjects from objects and from nature, therefore placing contemplative objects “out there,” while

what counts as ideal are subjective categories “in here” with consciousness and will. This both

de-historicizes and de-socializes categories and objects and thus fixes them into place once and

for all time. Any dynamic movement, contradiction, or negation from within cannot be grasped

and is therefore a “thing-in-itself” beyond reproach. The principle side effect is that what counts,

what “is,” is what appears to us as subjects in the form of a representation or image, and what

appears to us are the phenomenally fixed forms of bourgeois society (i.e., labor, value, and

property). As Marx summarizes in Capital, “The categories of bourgeois economics consist

precisely of the forms of this kind [i.e., the modern form which described above]. They are the

forms of thought which are socially valid…for the relations of production belonging to this

historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production.”149 Yet, what the

148
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 109.
149
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 169. Emphasis added.
 48

modern subject does not grasp, and in fact cannot grasp is that “The whole mystery of

commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of

commodity production, vanishes as soon as we come to other forms of production.”150

For us, however, the ideal151 is not transcendentally subjective but is socio-relational. To follow

Ilyenkov, it is “the form of a thing created by social-human labour…a form of [their] dynamic

life activity.”152 Social human life activity, lived experiences, and social relations are dynamic

and dialectical, so too are categories and subjectivity. The problem lies specifically in the kind of

dualism implicit in modernist bourgeois thought, in which these ideals become dualistically

separated from human life activity and become personified as subjects themselves. They thus

structure the everyday worldviews, “in which the process of production has mastery over

man.”153

Marx begins his analysis of Capital with seemingly the most trivial thing, namely the

commodity. But as we soon learn, the commodity only appears to be a simple thing. Rather, it is

an enigmatic creature of mythical proportions, “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and

theological niceties.”154 To the bourgeois subject, the commodity is simply an external object

existing in the world, which can be either used, owned, or exchanged as property. But this is to

view the matter in a static manner which completely misses the inner dialectic and contradictory

movement of the commodity-form as it substantially exists. The spectre like quality of the

commodity then does not arise from its external objectivity, but from something else. Marx asks

us, “Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes

150
Ibid.
151
Which we consider both intimately linked with both categories and subjects.
152
Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal, pp. 76, 77.
153
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 175.
154
Ibid., p. 163.
 49

the form of a commodity? Clearly it arises from this form itself.”155 But to grasp this, one must

be able to view it as moving, dynamic, and bound up with the social relations and contradictory

forces moving within it.

There is nothing at all trivial about a commodity. Its form is the root fetish for all of

bourgeois society, determining to a large extent our own subjectivity156 while containing within

it all the contradictions, in embryonic form, of that society. Dunayevskaya points out that the

commodity is the fantastic contradiction between use-value and value, the latter of which must

take on the form of appearance of exchange value because “of the contradictory nature of

labor.”157 It is the reflection of “the dual character of labor,”158 bound up in it. We will now

follow Dunayevskaya’s lead and begin at the source, namely the self-contradictory duality of

labor.

As we have said previously, to the bourgeois subject the category of labor is exactly as it

appears to be, a detachable thing external to the subject. It is transformation of the “lived body”

which we are into something which is external to ourselves as if the sole purpose of our body

were to be reduced to a thing, a “value.” Labor to the bourgeois eye is a superfluous predicate of

sorts which can be appropriated, alienated, or exchanged as a means to some externally imposed

end—a wage in the labor market, for example. Dunayevskaya puts this best, arguing that the

bourgeois economist David Ricardo is “a prisoner of his concept of human labor as a thing.”159 A

“thing” here signifies a closed “factual” entity. But, human labor is something socio-ontological

in nature and is intimately bound up in human social relations. Therefore, it is the form that

155
Ibid., p. 164.
156
Marx and Dunayevskaya describe this as the dualism or domination of dead over living labor, where dead labor
is personalized and living labor is objectified. This points us back to the inverted world thesis of German Ideology.
157
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 85.
158
Ibid., p. 99.
159
Ibid., p. 108.
 50

human subjectivity takes as these social relations moves in history. The value-form of the

commodity therefore, bears the mark not simply of “labor,” the static object of modern bourgeois

thought, but a particular manifestation of labor and a particular historical form of subjectivity

which “stamps that production as a particular species of social production and thereby gives it its

special historical character.”160

Human labor is, first and foremost, an existential part of the life of the species. We must

actively and practically engage with the world as mediated by our own (cooperative) laborious

activity in order to meet the existential needs of our lives. Marx acknowledges in Capital, “Labor

is, first of all, a process between man and nature,” in which “he acts upon external nature and

changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”161 We are thus dealing

with a category of universal importance. Yet, as we have stressed above, we are not dealing with

something fixed for once and all, but something that moves, changes, negates, and solidifies

itself historically. Marx argues in the Grundrisse that “Labour seems quite a simple category.

The conception of [which]…is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically

conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as the relations which create this

simple abstraction.”162 How is this so? Marx continues, “although the simpler category may have

existed historically before the more concrete, it achieved its full development precisely in a

combined form of society.”163 Therefore just as human subjectivity does not stand still

transcendentally, neither does the existential quality of human labor. Rather, it develops and

finds itself under definite points of determination and negation. In bourgeois society, human

labor—the creative self-activity of the human being in which she, on the one hand, both develops

160
Ibid., p. 101.
161
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 226.
162
Marx, Grundrisse, https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3.
163
Ibid. emphasis added.
 51

and receives nature as it is (as humans, after all, are natural beings), but on the other hand also

claims and develops her own creative capacities as her own—negates itself and passes over into

its opposite, namely alienated labor. Alienated labor is at its heart a dualistic phenomenon, in

which the product of human labor as well as nature itself confront people “as something alien, as

a power independent of the producer.”164

Marx describes this splitting of the category of labor (and implicitly the human subject as

well) as having a four-fold alienating character to it, all of which center around the idea that

human beings have become detached and individualized or atomized entities. Thus labor itself,

in its products, as well as its relation to nature have become externalized and confrontational

with each other. Marx describes how labor thus detached “takes on a power of its own,” and the

life which the person has given to it “confronts him as something hostile.”165 Dunayevskaya

refers to this as the tyranny of dead over living labor, in which the accumulated products of labor

(i.e., commodities) “oppress the living laborer.”166 The increase of productive forces and powers

is by no means, therefore, an advancement of progress. As long as human labor remains

something dualistically outside of humanity, the more wealth which it produces the more

degraded the worker167 becomes. Much like Kantian categories, when labor becomes merely an

instrument to be calculated and systemically employed in order to attain some sort of subjective

end which generally speaking is simply an end of survival, “Life activity, productive life itself,

appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need.”168 Marx continues, saying “Similarly, in

164
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 71.
165
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 72.
166
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 56.
167
We emphasize the term worker here in order to make more forceful the idea that the human takes on a
subjectivity not his own, therefore pointing not to the transcendental nature of the subject but rather the
dialectical nature of it.
168
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 75.
 52

degrading spontaneous activity, free activity, to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species

life a means to his physical existence.”169

Marx goes on to argue that the idea of estranged labor is at the root of bourgeois private

property relations as well as value and the commodity form—all of which points to the

increasingly transitory nature of the dualistic transcendental subject, which remains

transcendental because it does not recognize the contradictory splitting or historical locations of

the categories, which are the ultimate grounds for its knowledge. As Marx states, “Private

property is…the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the

worker to nature and to himself.”170 In this way the subject, to a certain extent unbeknown to

itself, has itself transformed into something else as this external-internal dualism becomes more

pronounced—namely a worker, a capitalist, or a manager, etc. rather than the continuously

sovereign being who appears on the surface. Marx points out that “It enables him to exist first as

a worker; and second as a physical subject…It is only as a worker that he continues to maintain

himself as a physical subject and it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.”171 But this

notion only exists here in its embryonic form. In order to pursue the matter further we must turn

to abstract labor (time), value, and fetishism.

With the movement from alienated to abstract labor, we see what was presented

embryonically in alienated labor become more developed. Marx is rightly credited (by

Dunayevskaya specifically) for having “split” the category of labor, first in the Manuscripts with

alienated labor, then in Capital with abstract labor, abstract labor-time and concrete labor. This is

the contradictory duality which gives the commodity its likewise contradictory nature. The

169
Ibid., p. 77.
170
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 79. Emphasis added.
171
Ibid., p. 73.
 53

reason he is allowed to do this is because he transforms the study of political economy, which to

bourgeois thought appears, as Dunayevskaya writes, “a science which deals with things,” into

something “which analyzes the relations of men.”172

With regards to the idea of concrete labor, there is no mystery. It parallels the simple use-value

of a commodity. For Marx, it is concrete labor itself which specifically creates use-values. Marx

gives us an example of a coat, stating that it is a product which satisfies a particular human need

and therefore, “A specific kind of productive activity is required to bring it into existence.”173

This kind of activity is useful labor, or concrete labor. All works of human labor are

inherently works of concrete labor, in so far as there is a specific person, performing a specific

task, in order to create a specific product. This kind of concrete activity is what makes the

product useful and provides it with its specific useful qualities. However, the category of labor

dialectically metamorphoses into a specific historical character under capitalist social relations.

Therefore, this useful concrete labor is not the form of labor the purchaser (the capitalist) is

interested in when she purchases it in the labor marketplace.174 Rather, the capitalist (i.e.,

“capital personified”) is interested in nothing more than labor as such: namely, a purely formal

and qualitatively empty labor, a kind of labor which is nothing more than an unsubstantial

congealed mass of simple labor (i.e., labor power). This is why Marx invites us to follow him

into the “hidden abode” of production, because only there can we grasp the thing itself, the

dialectical movement of concrete labor to abstract labor in which we find the value creating

process.

172
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 106.
173
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 132.
174
Technically speaking, the capitalist does not purchase labor, but the commodity labor-power in the market.
 54

It is obvious that one does not labor twice, regardless of when, where, or why this labor is

taking place. A factory worker at Ford Motor Company, or a cashier at Wal-Mart does not

complete her task concretely and then repeat the same task abstractly. There is only a single

labor process and there is no creature known on Earth as an abstract laborer. So where exactly

does abstract labor come from? Tombazos states that “It is the same [labor] time opposed which

it is opposed to itself, to the extent that it both creates the use-value and determines the

exchange-value.” It is “an opposition that also possesses quantitative dimensions.”175 Abstract

labor is, therefore, a negation within the same process of the qualitative aspect of concrete labor,

reducing it to a formal and quantitative character of labor pure and simple. This is a passage

“which does not assume any particular conceptual difficulties if one assumes that complex

labour is reducible to simple labor.”176

Abstract labor is labor reduced to a completely and radically uniform and continuous

time, quantity, and sameness without any regard for the mode of its expenditure. It is a social

substance, in that it is “one homogenous mass of human labor power.”177 Seen through this lens,

concrete labor is now nothing more than “merely the form of manifestation of its opposite,

abstract human labour.”178 This is why, as Chris Arthur writes, the concrete human labors are, at

the point of production, constantly hounded by the vampire-like nature of value (the source of

which is socially necessary abstract labor time). He argues, “Capital, as an abstract totality,

considers labour as its opposite, simply as the instrument of its valorization while it is forced to

allocate labours to different tasks. The point is that exploiting them yields a homogeneous

product, the accumulation of capital itself.” Arthur continues, “there is an inversion inherent in

175
Tombazos, p. 19.
176
Ibid.
177
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 150. Emphasis added.
178
Ibid.
 55

the capital relation such that the different concrete labours count merely as instances of their

abstract identity with each other in their potential for valorization—hence, as an abstract

totality.”179

This reduction of concrete to abstract labor should not be thought of as a physiological

phenomenon, as a reduction to the expenditure of muscles, nerves, and so forth. What

distinguishes this kind of society is that abstract labor and its measure in abstract labor-time

ceases to be reducible to a simple physiological expenditure or “type” of concrete labor. In other

words, it is a socio-relational ideal, a social substance. This homogenized mass of socio-

relational substance—abstract human labor, with utter disregard for the manner of its

manifestation—when measured according to its socially necessary time, is value. This is why

Marx refers in Capital to value (and implicitly the abstract labor which creates it) as a “ghostly

abstraction.” The value-form is thus completely ideal in the fact that it is a social consciousness

sprung from social relations and in no way does it exist purely inside the human head.

Ilyenkov points out that the Enlightenment thinkers conception of ideal, “cannot imagine what

subtle traps had been prepared…by these categories.”180 He is referring chiefly to the twin

notions of value and the value form to which we add the attaching effects on the modern view of

the subject. These social relations and their “ideal” attachments do not exist solely in the minds

of transcendental subjects, but in the social space and time. Value, and the value form, exist as

the mystified thing-in-itself which moves bourgeois society and it does so by “existing in things,

namely the commodities themselves,” Ilyenkov writes, “or only in their own heads.”181 However,

the subject of bourgeois society could not have grasped this by the root, thus remaining stuck in

179
Chris Arthur, “Value, Labor, and Negativity,” Capital and Class, No. 73 (Spring 2001): pp 15-39.
http://libcom.org/library/value-labour-negativity-christopher-arthur. Accessed: 24 February 2016.
180
Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” p. 44.
181
Ibid., p. 43.
 56

the fetishized realm of the marketplace where it can safely remain Capital’s most ardent

ideologue.

In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant gives us his well-known example of the “100 thalers”182

in order to draw the distinction between what is, on the one hand, actual and real and what, on

the other hand, is purely ideal. This occurs, ironically, in the section of the text in which Kant has

set out to critique the ontological argument for the existence of God. Kant writes:

The real [the object] contains no more than the merely possible [the concept]. A hundred real thalers do not
contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. For as the latter signify the concept, and the
former the object and the positing of the object, should the former contain more that the latter, my concept
would not, in that case, express the whole object, and would therefore not be an adequate concept of it. My
financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real thalers than it is by the mere
concept of them (that is, of their possibility). 183

For Kant, the punch line of the story proceeds something like this: it is one thing to have 100

thalers in one’s pocket (i.e., the actual substantial material) and it is quite another thing to have

the same amount of thalers only in one’s consciousness. In other words, ideal thalers. The point

is that that which appears phenomenally as a representation of some sense impression has more

reality that something which is pursued solely in the mind by pure reason. Kant writes, “We do

not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that the thing is. Otherwise it

would not be exactly the same thing that exists, but something more than we had thought in the

concept; and we could not, therefore, say the exact object of my concept exists.”184 However,

given what we have argued about the nature of value, we must ask Kant: is value simply a

property of his thalers? Or on the other hand, merely a subjective category? In a country

bordering Kant’s home of Germany (Prussia), France for instance, where the currency at his time

182
A thaler is a form of German coin currency used roughly between the 15th and 19th centuries.
183
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 505.
184
Ibid.
 57

were Francs, he might be reminded that his 100 thalers are not actual at all but instead nothing

more than symbols impressed on coins which have obligatory force only for German citizens.

In this example, Ilyenkov argues “if one acknowledges as ‘actual’ and ‘real’ only what is

authorised by the decrees of the Prussian king, affirmed by his signature and seal, and discounts

all else as other-worldly fictions, then Kant’s example proves what Kant wanted it to prove.”185

But if one takes on a more wide ranging view of what is real and what is ideal then it seem as

though Kant’s argument may in fact prove its opposite. Ilyenkov states, “Kant does not refute,

but affirms that very ‘ontological proof of the existence of god, which he declared to be a typical

example of an erroneous inference about the existence of a prototype outside of consciousness

from its image in consciousness.”186 Marx adds here that, “Real thalers have the same existence

that the imagined gods have. Has a real thaler an existence except in the imagination, if only the

general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use

of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.”187 In other words,

value is not a physical property of the thalers. Nor is it a merely ideal category of the

transcendental subject. It is a social-relationary ideal (a social thing-in-itself) which assumes,

via abstract social labor expended in the “hidden abode,” the form of appearance of commodities

(as Marx alludes to: “in the head” of the commodity).

The reproach against Kant is based on the argument that a philosophical system which

articulates as real all that exists outside a person’s consciousness, and ideal or conceptual as

whatever is not grasped in the form of such a thing. Ilyenkov writes, “Of course, real talers [sic]

185
Ilyenkov, “Dialectics of the Ideal,” p. 45.
186
Ibid.
187
Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in Marx-Engels Collected
Works, Vol. I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1902), https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-
theses/appendix.htm. Accessed: 22 February 2016. Emphasis added.
 58

in no way differ from the gods of primitive religion, the savage by no means regards the object

of his worship as a symbol of god; this object…is god.”188 These are the roots of fetishism.

Properties are attributed to corporeal objects that do not belong to them and it is exactly what

Kant does in ascribing value to his 100 thalers, by completely missing exactly how value is in

fact ideal—as the communal and social imagination of particular human social relations.

Therefore, gods and thalers seem to be phenomena of the same order and form, and the problem

of the ideal versus real relationship becomes associated in our view of the matter with the

problems of fetishism, alienation, and reification. With this in mind, Marx explains in his

doctoral dissertation, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of

Nature that:

In this sense all gods, the pagan as well as the Christian ones, have possessed a real existence. Did not the
ancient Moloch reign? Was not the Dephic Apollo a real power in the life of the Greeks? Kant’s critique
means nothing in this respect. If somebody imagines that he has a hundred talers [sic], if the concept is not
for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, then these hundred imagined talers have for him the
same value as a hundred real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his
imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods.189

The verdict is that Kant, or a Kantian, cannot and will not discover the secret of the ideality of

value. This has grave implications for the modern view of subjectivity.

To push this further, Marx offers for us one of the most powerful sets of ideas to grasp

both the contradictory movements of the categories of labor and value in the social space and the

Enlightenment subject’s inability to get a firm handle on the matter (thus revealing its ideological

nature). Namely, the “three peculiarities” of the equivalent form of value found in the third

section of chapter one of Capital entitled “The Value-Form, or Exchange Value.” According to

Marx, the three peculiarities appear on the surface during the exchange process in which

188
Ibid., pp. 45-46.
189
Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,
https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/appendix.htm.
 59

commodities are being measured and compared with each other in terms of their values.190 Marx

introduces them precisely to show to us the great fetish that the commodity is, its appearance on

the surface of society, and the way in which they (the peculiarities) serve as a kind of inverted

character mask for the real and grotesque movement that is its essence. For our purposes, it also

serves to show the ideological character of Enlightenment subjectivity.

Very briefly, the first peculiarity of the equivalent form of value in the exchange process

is that “use-value [the substantial body of the commodity] becomes the form of appearance of its

opposite, value.”191 The second peculiarity states that “concrete labour becomes the form of

manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour.”192 In other words, the substance of the

equivalent (its use-value), the most mature form being the money form, becomes the

embodiment of pure labor in the abstract. But as we can see, this abstract labor (again, the value-

creating “substance”) is borne by the mask of its concrete appearance and thus cannot be caught

by the subject on the surface. The third and final peculiarity is that “private labour takes the form

of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form.”193 This final peculiarity presents us

with the most difficulty,194 and is also the most important. It is our argument that what Marx

essentially means here is that private labor acts as the masking appearance on the surface of the

“essence” of purely social labor. Taken in combination with the other two peculiarities, what we

get is that individual concrete labor acts as the appearance of abstract labor (which give us value)

190
This comparison passes between several increasingly more complex forms throughout the section in which
Marx ultimately arrives at the money-form as the most mature form of equivalent and hence the universal
equivalent.
191
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 148.
192
Ibid., p. 150.
193
Ibid., p. 151.
194
The primary reason for this difficulty is that there has been a measure of controversy surrounding the Ben
Fowkes translation of Marx’s text and whether or not he presents an accurate presentation of Marx’s German text
in the regard to the third peculiarity.
 60

and that private labor acts as the appearance of social labor. The private act gives us the

appearance of use-value.

Again, Marx does not have in mind that the social is an ahistorical essence (thing-in-

itself) but that the private and the social form two moments of a moving polarity. The three

peculiarities are thus united in the discussion of the duality of value and use-value reflected upon

the “brains” of the subjects involved. This “social” is the “social” of Capital. “The private

producer’s brain [i.e., the subject] reflects this twofold social character of his labour only in the

forms which appear in practical intercourse, in the exchange of products.”195 However, and this

is the crucial point, these private producers do not seem to realize that such events occur. In other

words, they do not have a handle on such peculiarities and therefore lock themselves into the

sphere of the private and the individual—the isolated world of the Enlightenment and the “innate

rights of Man.” Marx summarizes this point by stating:

Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relations with each other as values because they
see these objects as the material integuments of homogenous human labour. The reverse is true: by
equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of
labour. They do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its
forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic…Their own movement in
society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their
control, in fact control them.196

It is therefore not we, the possessors of God-given rights, who are subject,197 but value

itself, with its own (ideal-real categoreal) movement and ideas woven into the fabric of everyday

life. As Dunayevskaya writes, “The perverse nature of capitalist production is such that…the

machine is the master of man.”198 Marx invites us to think of this process in terms of a kind of

colonizing foreign language, which forces all particular languages to be translated into the

195
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 166. Emphasis added.
196
Ibid., pp. 166-168.
197
The word Subject is capitalized here to refer to THE Subject of society, i.e. the gravitational point to which all
(lowercase ‘s’) subjects are pulled toward.
198
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 105.
 61

universal language of the marketplace, in order that anything at all might be understood. He says,

“Ideas which first have to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign language in

order to circulate, but the analogy lies not in language, but in the foreignness of language.”199

This is a foreignness which nevertheless remains hidden from all the colonized who rush

to assimilate. This idea rightly also invokes the language of colonialism, and the relationship

between the colonizer and the colonized. The point is that each of the subjects in the duality—

colonizer and colonized—do not exist immutably, in the same way the innate rights of mankind

do not exist ahistorically. Rather, human beings take up this pseudo subjectivity (of the

commodity-form) in regards to a third thing, the ideal social relations mediating them. In this

case, it is the movement of capital which has been turned against and controls them. Value is, as

Tombazos alludes to, akin to a kind of Platonic dialogue of bourgeois society, which the

bourgeois subject does not realize she is in. “Every particular argument in these dialogues claims

to be universal,” he claims. “But only Socrates’s critique ‘validates’ the truly universal elements

in the particular argument.”200

It is value imbued with the appearance of animate personality, which in its initial form in

production is pure potentiality, but a potentiality whose sole purpose in life is to seek actuality.

Value must not only live but grow. In short, it must become capital (i.e., value-in-motion). It

grows by way of realizing its surplus value created in production, confirmed in exchange, and

then thrown back into the fire of production. Its perpetual movement sinks deeper and deeper

into the fabric of the society in which its creators have become mere pawns. Hegel gives us the

clue to this in the Science of Logic, arguing that this movement is an “end in its own self the urge

to realize itself; the determinateness of the moments of the Notion is externality; but their

199
Marx, Grundrisse, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm.
200
Tombazos, p. 22.
 62

simplicity in the unity of the Notion is inadequate to the nature of this unity, and the Notion

therefore repels itself from itself.”201

Tombazos points out that, in the realm of circulation (i.e., the inverted world as it appears

to the bourgeois mind), if we replace Hegel’s term Notion with Marx’s term Capital, and if we

specify that the “moments” to which Hegel refers are the commodity and money, we are

presented with a very plausible idea of Marx’s equivocation of Capital/Value with Hegel’s

Notion, and likewise the apparent subject of bourgeois society.202 To this point, Marx writes in

the Grundrisse that capital “Is the unity of the commodity and money, but the unity of the two in

the movement. It is neither the one nor the other, but both simultaneously the one and the

other.”203 Thus we have a scenario, in which capital, as self-perpetuating value charged with

what appears to be a current of personhood, becomes anew what it has already been.

This is because capital in circulation, appears to us teleologically. In other words, as an

end in itself and a model for its own vitality and therefore self-renewal and growth. As Marx

writes in Capital, “It [value itself] is constantly changing from one form into the other, without

becoming lost in the movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject…it has

acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays

golden eggs.”204 It is a process of life for which the best example is, ironically, not biological life

but rather theological:

In the circulation M-C-M’, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through
a process of its own and for which commodities and money are both mere forms…Instead of simply
representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself as it were. It
differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates
himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person; for only by
the surplus-value of $10 does the $100 originally advanced become capital, and so as soon as this has

201
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 742.
202
Tombazos, p. 79.
203
Marx, Grundrisse, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm, in Tambazos, p.
79.
204
Marx. Capital Vol. I, p. 255.
 63

happened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes
again, and both become one, $110.205

Capital, therefore, gives us the appearance of a living organism, whose attributes include

both a body (the material of commodities) and a mind (the law of value) of its own, and who

comes to operate itself under its own kind of self-determination. This organism appears as a real

(ideal-real) operative social subject, in fact THE social subject capable of imposing its own rules,

institutions, and laws. Consequently, we are inclined to think of the matter of Capital in Marx

analogously not only to the Notion in Hegel, but the role of Socrates in Plato to which Tombazos

writes, “Socrates is not simply an empirical singularity, a particular man among others…He is:

reason when compared with particular ways of reasoning; ethics when compared with particular

moral values; and the embodiment of the universal among the particulars or the universal

individual.”206

Yet, objects in the mirror are not always as they appear. On the one hand, capital is none

other than self-perpetuating value. It is value in motion. But value itself, is nothing more than an

enacted, socio-historical, and therefore ideal (Ilyenkov) human social relation. It is created in the

social labor process, by social human beings, through the historically specific mode of socially

necessary abstract labor-time. In the final analysis, there is no (economic) value without human

beings and without their lived, embodied, human social productive relations and experiences.

But on the other hand, due to the modern dualism of subject and object (a contradiction inherent

in the capitalist labor process itself), and the subsequent alienated and inverted bourgeois world

of appearance and essence, this social ideal substance takes on a life of its own outside the

control of any individual and acts back upon and directs the flow of human affairs. The life of

205
Ibid., p. 256.
206
Tombazos, p. 21.
 64

this now subjectified object is purely ideological. Yet despite its ideological character, it

nevertheless has very real power in the disclosure of the lifeworld of human beings and the

horizon in which it (the lifeworld) is revealed to them.

At this point the conclusion should be clear: it is capital which responds, and men and

women who react. Here human beings do not exist as sovereign subjects (i.e., as Homo

economicus), but as workers, and as capitalists; as colonizers, and as colonized. Further, it is not

as though these are merely “accidental” attributes or predicates but rather they are actual makers

of subjectivity in the sense that they are woven into the fabric of social relations. Under capital;

you are a worker, not a transcendental subject who happens on occasion to be a worker. This is

not and should not be taken as a morality statement or an ethical value judgment.207 This is the

specific historical character of bourgeois social relations, that capital feeds on humanity. We find

this startlingly clear in Marx’s preface to the first edition of Capital, in which he states,

“individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they the personifications of economic

categories, the bearers of particular class relations and interests.”208 The idea of subjects and

subjectivity is laid bare in the concealed (i.e., inverted) movement of the categories themselves

as they operate relationally in society, most clearly in the hidden abode of production. It is in the

productive setting where the appearance of capital as subject is enacted from the human social

207
However there is and always should be an obviously an implied ethics to the matter. We are not simply
attempting to make a simple, objective view of the facts here but are trying to detail the elements of a historical
struggle. In this instance, we would do well to follow the example of Che Guevara, who wrote in “Socialism and
Man in Cuba” that, “In these circumstances one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of
justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We
must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as
examples, as a moving force.” From: “Socialism and Man in Cuba,”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm
208
Marx, Capital Vol. I, p. 92.
 65

relations. This is the point where the “one hour worker appears…whose value is measured in

terms of the time during which it functions.”209

Hence the comparison to the Hegelian Notion in the quotation above (note 199). As

Tombazos states, “There is not the slightest doubt that...circulation, in Marx, owes a lot to the

Hegelian doctrine of the ‘Notion.’”210 He goes on later to write “The Notion…is the only

possible discourse capable of grasping the economic world as a structed and ordered totality.”211

However, and this arguably is the most important point of all, the Notion is the best possible

discourse for apprehending the bourgeois and therefore inverted economic world. In short, the

ideological world of Enlightenment appearance. As Marx makes very clear, the movement of

capital as subject (Notion) takes place in circulation, i.e., the realm of the bourgeois market and

the surface image. Marx points out in the Grundrisse “Circulation…does not carry within itself

the principle of self-renewal. The moments of the latter are presupposed to it.”212 From whence

is this presupposition located? In production, which is a social relation carried out by human

beings, and where human beings cannot be abstracted away. If the capitalist could detach the

labor-power commodity from the lived body of worker she would, but she cannot. The worker

must come with it.

Capital, therefore, is analogous to the Hegelian Notion, but in inverted form through the

ideological lens of the camera obcsura of circulation, the realm of “liberty, equality, property

and Bentham.” It is thus only the appearance and pretender to the true Notion. Capital is the

pseudo Notion and likewise the pseudo subject. It’s power and existence is akin to that of the

virus or the vampire—it has no life, no prospects, without feeding off of its hosts. The hosts in

209
Tombazos, p. 111.
210
Tambazos, p. 75.
211
Ibid., p. 82.
212
Marx, Grundrisse, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm.
 66

this case being the lived, embodied human beings and their social relations. Its subjectivity,

therefore, is on the one hand very real, yet on the other nothing more than a ghostly abstraction

in the way a virus cannot have life without its human host while at the very same time

controlling her. Capital’s subjectivity arises and exists solely on the basis of embodied and

enacted humanity, yet because of its religious, fetish-like (i.e., the fetish of the commodity), and

alienating character nevertheless dominates them as props to its own purposes.

The category of time plays no small role in the matter. Kant argues in the

“Transcendental Aesthetic” of Critique of Pure Reason that time, although not a category of the

understanding, is an a priori, transcendentally ideal intuition which the transcendental subject

inherently possesses, and thus employs in order to form intuitions. Kant states, “Time is a

necessary representation that underlies all intuitions…Time is, therefore, given a priori…[It is] a

pure form of sensible intuition.”213 He goes on later in the section to add that “Time is nothing

but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state.”214 But for

Marx’s theory of value, time—in the form of pure quantitative clock-time—as a socially moving

category has a much more sinister role in that takes on a vampire like quality to it, sucking the

life out of qualitative humanity, leaving the person as nothing more than a kind of machine. It is

the subordination of man to the machine. Marx writes in the Poverty of Philosophy, “The

pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers

as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Time is everything, man is nothing; he at most time’s

carcase [sic]. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day

213
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 75.
214
Ibid., p. 77.
 67

for day.”215 It is the domination of the dead labor of the machine and the ever constant ticking of

the clock over the lives and quality of the human being become worker.216

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault further describes this strange structuring

omnipotent power of the factory clock. He writes, “A specialized personnel became

indispensable, constantly present and distinct from the workers: In the large factory, everything

is regulated by the clock. The workers are treated strictly and harshly.”217 In other words, the

workers are transformed by the very nature of their alienated activity, into a class which likewise

defines the very nature of their subjectivity accordingly with the measure of value in production.

So too is the subjectivity of the class of managers, which Foucault rightly notes are

indispensable and present, yet constantly separated socially from the workers. They confront

each other in a manner akin to aliens. Foucault continues: “Surveillance [by both the clock and

managers] thus becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production

machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power.”218 The workers are nothing

more than conscious organs, coordinated with the “unconscious organs” of the machine.

Together, they are subordinated to the pure quantitative “barrack discipline”219 of the clock, the

plan of the capitalist, and the law of value. Lukács captures the fundamental aspects of this story

by arguing:

Time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable
continuum filled with quantifiable things…In this environment where time is transformed into abstract,

215
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. by the Institute for Marxism Leninism (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1955), https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01b.htm.
216
We could likewise describe this as the domination of constant capital over variable capital, where constant
capital is embodied in the dead labor of things and machines transferred to the value of a commodity and variable
capital is embodied in the living worker as the value creating portion of the equation. Thus variable capital is
described as variable precisely because it not yet a determined conclusion just how much value the worker will add
to production during a day of work. This depends upon the length and intensity of the working day.
217
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995), pp 174-175.
218
Ibid., p. 175.
219
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 115.
 68

exactly measurable, physical space, an environment is at once the cause and effect of the scientifically and
mechanically fragmented and specialized production of the object of labour, the subjects must likewise be
rationally fragmented...into something opposed to their total personality…into the permanent ineluctable
reality of their daily life. Here, too, the personality can do no more than look on helplessly, while its own
existence is reduced to an isolated particle fed into an alien system. 220

Echoing both Lukács and Dunayevskaya, Foucault adds a similar idea in which the

Enlightenment ideas of discipline and method come screaming back at us with a brutal

vengeance. He writes, “The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the

disciplines.”221 He goes on, stating that human beings have essentially:

become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be
constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the
body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short,
one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and given him ‘the air of the soldier.’ 222

When we have reached this point, the circle has now returned to that of alienation. The alienation

of human beings from labor (labor as a human process) and likewise the subject from object is

complete. Labor, rather than forming a unity through activity with a subject, is now an alien

objectivity and reduced to its most abstract element and therefore can produce only commodities,

which are nothing more than a form of appearance of human labor’s opposite, namely value.

Likewise, this divorcing of subject from object in the labor process takes on the form of a

mask which hides the character of the inversion which the subject cannot recognize because its

movement requires grasping the root of the matter. The inversion gains not only an objectivity all

its own but it also realizes an ideological and parasitic form of subjectivity. It does so through the

prism of the camera obscura, in which real human subjects are fed on (i.e., dead labor feeding on

living human labor) and likewise become mere objects. Dunayevskaya writes that the inherent

connection existing between human laborers and their various labors “appears to them, ideally,

in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority

220
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm
221
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 222.
222
Ibid., p. 135. Emphasis added.
 69

of the same capitalist.”223 In other words, workers and the working class are historically blinded

to their station and willingly cede power to capital as a self-evident reality based on

phenomenological experiences of daily life as a form or common sense. In this development,

alienation and reification merge. The outcome is fetishism, “haunted by Monsieur le Capital and

Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things.”224 The everyday

validity and effectiveness of this kind of fetish remains strong because the real human agents feel

at home in this historical life-world. They are the appearances within which they move, in which

they are daily involved, and how they relate to one another.

This is not to say that people or workers are “stupid,” and “sheepish.” Rather, it is to say

that workers in bourgeois society are alienated within a likewise alienated lifeword. This is,

again, the modern dialectic between fatalism and formalism. Between freedom and fetishism,

where the fetish (as an enacted ideology of social relations) nevertheless discloses in the world

the form that freedom (also ideological) takes under such social relations.

This is best spelled out by French philosopher Guy Debord and his text, The Society of

the Spectacle. There he writes, “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously

positive…It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’”225

Debord continues, stating “the real world [thus] changes into simple images…[which] become

real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior…as a tendency to make one see the

world by means of various specialized mediations.”226 However Debord is quick to point out that

this idea is not universal and static, but it instead historical, dialectical, and rooted in real

relations of real people. “The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion…It

223
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 110. Emphasis added.
224
Marx, Capital Vol. III, trans. by D. Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 969. Emphasis added.
225
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), chapter 1, paragraph 12.
226
Ibid., chapter 1, paragraph 18.
 70

has only tied them to an earthly base…[and] shelters within itself its absolute denial, its

fallacious paradise.”227 Therefore, our eyes should not leave the historical and relationary nature

of the dialectic between those alienated yet real subjects (i.e., the human beings, living humanity

itself) and the ideological and fetishized false subject, namely capital, a “thing” which has been

given personality. As Debord writes, capital, “the fetishistic, purely objective appearance of

spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes.”228

But under the historical social relations the enlightened subject cannot see this, for all it sees are

“cheaper goods.”229 It is the peculiar phenomenon that occurs within the historical form of

subjectivity in bourgeois society, wherein subjects experience themselves only “at home” within

themselves when they are in the marketplace (i.e., in the realm of ideology). In his manuscript on

“The Meaning of Human Requirements” Marx summarizes this circumstance, arguing that it

entails the destruction of all human needs, only to be replaced by newer subjective kinds of

needs. “Every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh

sacrifice…to seduce him into a new mode of gratification.”230 He goes on to write that

everything this kind of subjectivity steals from a person’s humanity is replaced “in money and in

wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do.”231

Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse each elaborate in greater depth and detail this

problem in their works The Sane Society (Fromm) and One Dimensional Man (Marcuse). Fromm

asks, “can a society be sick?” Writing in a passage which tracks Lukács’ charge of

Enlightenment fatalism-formalism, he states “We consume, as we produce, without any concrete

227
Ibid., chapter 1, paragraph 20. Emphasis added.
228
Ibid., chapter 1, paragraph 24. Emphasis added.
229
Ibid., p. 116.
230
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 93.
231
Ibid., p. 96.
 71

relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only

connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”232 Marcuse

highlights a dichotomy of needs, specifically human needs and historical needs. The character of

the latter have always, he argues, been “preconditioned” and the seizing of it as a need “depends

on whether or not it can be seen as desirable and necessary for the prevailing societal institutions

and interests.”233 In our own postmodern and neoliberal world, as Marx alluded to, it seems as

though people more or less embrace a notion of individualist subjectivity construction in the

market. In this case, we have a Sartrean notion gone horribly wrong in that “I am nothing but my

own choices,” but my choices take the form of being ideologically limited to those of

consumption, as the parasitic pseudo subject, capital, seeks self-valorization:

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The
range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human
freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual…the extent to which this civilization
transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation
questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their
automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to
his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced. 234

Viewed in this light, bourgeois subjectivity seems to be nothing more than what we have

been arguing: a kind of voluntarist and self-constructed representation. It is an ensemble of

chosen character masks, packaged and represented to the world as an image, similar to a brand

advertisement. Spawning from a modernist lineage, to be is to be seen and processed in much the

same respect as the commodity circulating on the marketplace. In describing the commodity

Marx uses the term “social hieroglyph,” but in this context the better term might be “social

hologram.” We view this in the sense that one is obviously outwardly presenting a physical body

232
Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 134.
233
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odm1.html. Accessed: 2 March 2016. The interests to which
Marcuse is eluding too are the interests of Capital as subject.
234
Ibid.
 72

to the world but nevertheless one that is holographic in nature insofar as it is nothing more than a

self-branded subjective advertisement (in commodity terms a “social use value” of sorts) that

serves only as a detached, self-moving form of appearance not only masking but colonizing a

human reality.235

This is perhaps the lowest form of the alienating quality of capitalist ideology. Tombazos

describes the human being as there “only as a prop, not as a subject,” who “lives by consuming

itself…transplanted from the [human] biological body to the economic body of capital.” At this

level, “Alienation…is a real mutilation.”236 Here, human beings seemingly disfigure their own

humanity in order to achieve what under current social conditions seems to be the case—a

transcendental subjectivity. Martinican philosopher and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon introduces

and lays out these ideas in great detail throughout several of his works. Working within the

context of neo-colonialism and the colonial experience, he argues in Black Skin, White Masks

that the colonized people (and here it is fair to call those under capitalism colonized), viewed

through the lens of their colonizers are “completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the

other…who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far

indeed, and made myself an object… All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted

to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together.”237

The essential point Fanon wishes to make is one regarding recognition of real humanity,

as he says, “to be a man among other men.”238 But this kind of recognition never comes for

235
This is not to say that this human reality is somehow an immutable or static universal essence. It is not.
Humanity goes through a many sided process of dialectical movement just as any other category does. What we
are referring to here, is the dualism which takes place when Subjectivity becomes severed from its humanity and
becomes nothing more than an individualist, consumer construction.
236
Tombazos, p. 80.
237
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 85.
238
Ibid.
 73

bourgeois subjectivity, because under such relations socio-ontological resistance is nearly null

and void (in an ideological sense) and one bounces back and forth between two frames of

reference within which one has been placed. Fanon writes, “His metaphysics, or, less

pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out, because

they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.”239

Thus the corrosive nature of the problem to which Dunayevskaya alludes, writing that

“Somewhere along the way to a mind of your own, you would be able to force some

recognition…as man, as woman, and not just as slave.” But “the really Absolute, where there is

no reciprocity, is this slave...not at all recognized by the Other.”240

In this sense, bourgeois subjectivity truly does oscillate between fatalism and formalism

in a most extreme way. For I am fatalistically alienated to a point of nothingness in the face of

that which oppresses me. However by way a of formalistic voluntarism, I take and construct

myself as if I were a colonizer. This does nothing but to re-enforce the bourgeois idea of

subjectivity and therefore doubles down on its power.

239
Ibid., p. 83.
240
Dunayevskaya, “Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and the Dialectics of Today,” in The Power of Negativity, p. 193.
 74

Chapter VI: The Postmodern Challenge—Or, Does Postmodernism Escape Modernism?

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” – George Orwell241

In the late 1950’s, sociologist C. Wright Mills proclaimed that “We are at the ending of

what is called the Modern Age.” He continued, stating that Enlightenment modernism “Is being

succeeded by a post-modern period.”242 Mills surmised that this new period was one marked by

the fact that all of the historical expectations for what we could broadly characterize as “western

culture” were at best no longer relevant and at worst, outright oppressive. Much of what Mills

states echoes our arguments, if only perhaps through a different lens than ours in that the faith in

the Enlightenment ideas such as “reason” and “progress” are not at all what they appear to be

and in fact, “have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves.”243

It was during what some historians refer to as this “Golden Age of Capitalism” that this kind of

well warranted pessimism was born. It a pessimism rooted in the idea that many of the problems

of western society had been either already solved or if not, that the requisite tools were readily

available to do so. So in actuality, the melancholy attitude exemplified by Mills is not one of

failure, but apparent success. Ellen Meiskins Wood writes in her essay “What is the Postmodern

Agenda?” that “Many of the Enlightenment’s principle objectives, [Mills] suggested, had indeed

been realized. The rationalization of social and political organization; scientific and

technological progress...the spread of universal education...and so on.”244 Yet these ideas have

done little to advance the cause of human liberation, or lead to the dialectical movement toward

241
George Orwell, George Orwell: A Collection of Essays (New York: Harvest Books, 1981), p. 152.
242
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 165-167.
243
Ibid.
244
Ellen Meiskins Wood, “What is the ‘Postmodern’ Agenda?” in In Defense of History: Marxism and the
Postmodern Agenda, ed. by Ellen Meiskins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1997), p. 2.
 75

the “many-sided” human being,245 but have instead become ossified by taking the form of the

alienated bourgeois subject. The frightening consequences include the advent of dualistic

consumer-subjects, or more or less contemplative and “cheerful” robots who fatalistically adopt

themselves to prevailing conditions over which they had no control and any urge to break free is

non-existent.

As alienation and the continued dislocating of the bourgeois subject from humanity in

this “new” kind of capitalism (i.e., the “Golden Age”) delves deeper and deeper, it seems to cast

a kind of irrevocable spell, from which there is no escape. Marcuse hints at this notion, arguing:

Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since
ceased to be confined to the factory.…when the individuals identify themselves with the existence which is
imposed upon them and have in it their own development and satisfaction. This identification is not illusion
but reality. However, the reality constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation. The latter has become
entirely objective; the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence. There is only
one dimension, and it is everywhere and in all forms. 246

The result is the appearance of a closed system, within which there is nothing else remaining

between people other than “naked self-interest...in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has

resolved personal worth into exchange value...In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious

and political illusions.”247 This leads to a further question. Namely, despite everything we’ve

said up to this point, in an attempt both to de-center the bourgeois subject and show how

subjectivity moves historically, rather than being fixed universally, have bourgeois society (and

bourgeois subjectivity) won? Thus, however we may in fact describe the multifarious

“postmodern” condition, I think it is at least fair to say that it is an emergent product of a

philosophical consciousness formed in this capitalist golden age. We get hints of this thinking in

Marx, because for him capital is not merely a system of economics or distribution of resources.

245
As Marcuse states, we are the in effect the exact opposite of the many sided human being. We are the one
sided (one dimensional) human being.
246
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/64onedim/odm1.html.
247
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, p. 475
 76

Instead, capital is a social metaphysics. It is a historical horizon of being. As Michael Eldred puts

it “ [Capital] is not a theory of the capitalist economy with the appropriate specialized concepts;

rather, it is a questioning and a presentation of the essence of capital, its social ontology or

metaphysics, which...is not a human machination, but a constellation of being that shapes and

determines an historical world.”248 It is the self-sustaining, self-reproducing image of the world

par excellence.

The question for us is if the subject of bourgeois society is at once alienated and exploited

(fatalistic), and at the same time inherently oppressive in its appearance in the market place (i.e.,

the domain of the capitalist and the colonizer, as embodiments of historical-social relations), then

is it possible that a true subjectivity fully adequate to our humanity to ever exist? Rather than

being a historically, socially, and dialectically moving entity perhaps the subject is quite literally

nothing at all. Maybe it is nothing more than an artefact of inherently dictatorial relations of

power and discourse. Foucault describes spelling this idea out as the major objective of his

philosophical career, which is “To create a history of the different modes by which, in our

culture, human beings are made subjects.”249

We get a glimpse of this from Marx in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right,” especially in his example of the relationship between bureaucracy and the

state, in which he states, “The bureaucrats are the Jesuits and theologians of the state.”250 In

much the same way, the capitalist is nothing more than the subjective embodiment of Capital,

“Hence, authority is the basis of its knowledge, and the deification of authority is its

248
Michael Eldred, Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger, (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,
2015), http://www.arte-fact.org/capiteen.html#6.0. Accessed: 15 February 2015.
249
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 777.
250
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” p. 25.
 77

conviction.”251 In other words, bourgeois subjects are “by nature,” as subjects, oppressive

because the movement of the society in which they find themselves is equally oppressive. In this

example, everything is infected with a double-meaning--one that is “real” and one viewed

through the lens of bureaucracy. But all that appears to count is this latter meaning. Knowledge

and reason, in order to have authority, must be viewed through from the angle of power. This

Marx calls “a hierarchy of knowledge... [in which] all are mutually deceived.”252 The outcome is

that “Actual knowledge seems devoid of content, just as actual life seems dead; for this

imaginary knowledge and this imaginary life are taken for the real thing.”253

In short, it seems as though the authority and power of the bureaucrat (as subject--the

bureaucratic subject) is the creator of what counts as knowledge, truth, etc. But for Marx, these

things are always historical and relational, and what appears on the surface, given certain

historical relations, always can serve as a mask over the real contradictions at play. Because of

this, Marx is allowed to make the distinction between actual and imaginary. Therefore, with

Marx what is at issue is still the ideological nature of the matter.

This provides us with a connection point to Foucault, who wants to leverage the idea to

the maximum, in that he wishes to obliterate Marx’s dichotomy between actual-imaginary. By

this we mean that Foucault, “dissolves the problem of ideology into the concept of ‘knowledge’

and ‘discourse’ and then transferred it...to the concept of power.”254 Whereas we criticized the

Enlightenment subject as ideological for its inability to see itself as a historical byproduct of

capital, for Foucault, the subject of bourgeois society is not a particular ideological incarnation at

251
Ibid., p. 24.
252
Ibid.
253
Ibid.
254
Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013),
p. 190.
 78

all. Instead it is nothing but a myth, a purely constructed entity at the behest of power. As he

writes:

It is...the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge...The man
described for us...is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’
inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over
the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. 255

Rather than having the concept of power be historically moving and tied to human social

relations, Foucault de-historicizes the category and in so doing solidifies it into one of

ontological transcendence. In this act of de-historicizing, Foucault appears to share a deep

affinity with modernism. The difference is that he merely jumps to the other side of the same

coin. Rather than having a sovereign transcendental subject who looks out upon the world with a

God’s eye view, we now have non-relational and ahistorical flows of power and discourse which

have the ontological pride of place. As Foucault put it above, “The soul is the effect and

instrument of a political anatomy.” But either way, whether modern or postmodern, the dualism

between subject and object appears to remain and the idea of the history and dialectic of

categories, which are none other than human social relations in ideal form, is non-existent.

For Foucault this permeation of power is not only how subjects are formed but seemingly

also how human beings are formed as well. He writes, “Omnipresence of power: not at all

because it regroups everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every

instant, at every point, or moreover in every relation between one point and another. Power is

everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.”256 This idea does

have merit, and it is similar to what we have described previously in our discussion of capital as

subject in bourgeois society and its molding, to a certain extent, of us as objects of its own

phantom-like subjectivity. But again, the crucial difference is the ideological nature with which

255
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 30.
256
Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. I, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 121-122.
 79

we hold this notion. Capital is not a once and for all fixed metaphysical category, but a human

social relation which has taken on a life of its own. Foucault does not seem to want to make this

inverted or ideological distinction, therefore designating what counts not only as a human subject

but even a human being as well is nothing but a side effect of the transcendental discourse of

power. He gives an example of this in the first volume History of Sexuality arguing that the pre-

subjective (i.e., prior to subject formation) yet seemingly undeniable human attribute of sexual

drive is power constructed. He argues that

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an
obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical
construct…a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the
incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges [sic], the strengthening of controls…are
linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. 257

Here Foucault makes an apparent connection with German philosopher Martin

Heidegger, especially in regards to one of his primary critiques of Western thought that the idea

of “Being” has been repressed through much of Enlightenment thinking for the purposes of

fanaticizing the self-empowerment of a transcendent subject, thus transforming it (Being) into an

object of manipulation.258 As he writes in one of his lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche, which

contains an example of biology as a science, “All biology already presupposes a more or less

explicitly drawn essential delimitation of appearances that constitute its realm of objects. This

realm…is that of living beings.” For Heidegger, however, this is the primary problem because it

fails to take into account that “Underlying the delimitation of this realm there is again a

preconception of what distinguishes and sets apart living beings as such, namely, life. The

essential realm in which biology moves can itself never be posited and grounded by biology as a

257
Ibid., p. 106.
258
Rehmann, p. 192.
 80

science, but can always only be presupposed.”259 This underlying ontological and preconditional

realm to which Heidegger is referring is what he earlier in his career defined as “Being,” of

which Dasein plays the most important role.

On this point, we share a great deal of agreement—if we hold that Being is something of

this world and is something at the heart of human activity which is being ideologically

suppressed by a form of subjectivity formed by Capital as subject.260 However, it appears as

though Heidegger (with his concept of Being) and Foucault (with his idea of Power) want to take

the matter a step further, namely to sterilize their concepts in order to rediscover “a purified

ontology or a radical thought of being.”261

Foucault and Heidegger’s concepts thus into ontologically ideal ones, thus severing them

both from humanity on the one hand and history on the other. In the case of Heidegger, this

means a kind of cleansed “image” of a being-in-the-world which is somehow free from the

material contingencies defined as a “transcendence of Dasein,”262 which knows nothing of the

real human needs of want, hunger, thirst, nor anything of the existential lived experiences of

race, gender, and class. And for Foucault it is simply a transmission of power, discourse, and

knowledge. “It is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. Discourse transmits

and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and

makes it possible to thwart it.”263 In short, there are no such things as real, material human needs

outside the realm of discourse.

259
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. III, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank Capuzzi (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 41.
260
Again, by this we mean that Capital, as a category of human social relations, has become a “primary driver” of
society, with human beings operating as merely passengers, despite the fact that they in fact built the car.
261
Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 342.
262
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), p. 235.
263
Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I, pp. 100-101.
 81

In either respect, the overthrowing of Kant’s transcendental subject consists in converting

the same characteristics of the transcendental from an idea of the subject to something else,

whether Being, or Power, or something else equally generic and therefore out of historical reach.

In the end they amount to much of the same thing. Namely, a de-historicized, non-dialectical,

and ontologically separated category excluded from any and all human praxis.

In “The Meaning of Human Requirements,” Marx makes a clear distinction between true

needs and ideological needs, or needs created for a certain kind of historical subject. “He [the

political economist] changes the worker [i.e., as subject] into an insensible being lacking all

needs…Just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity.”264 Marx goes on

to state, “Political economy, this science of wealth is therefore simultaneously the science of

denial, of want, of thrift, of saving—and it actually reaches the point where it spares the man the

need of either fresh air or physical exercise.”265 Political economy, in creating the transcendental

subject imbued with all the “innate rights of man” and a blank slate free of any apparent human

need, is free to speculate on the ideology of the socially constructed needs. “Self-denial, the

denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine…the less you are the more you

have…Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he

replaces from you in money and in wealth.”266 The key distinction is that Marx finds these sort of

subjective needs purely ideological, as a residue of social relations of bourgeois society. Erich

Fromm points out a similar distinction. He writes that that what we have is a dualism between

general “human drives and appetites…which are integral to human nature,” and those “shown

264
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 95.
265
Ibid.
266
Ibid., pp. 95-96.
 82

subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an

ingenious and always calculating subservience.”267

Foucault does not make this distinction, and he considers all needs as constructed in the

same way the political economist (in the name of Capital) in Marx’s example denies humanity in

order to construct a certain kind of “person” and a certain kind of subject. Acknowledging

anything else is to fall into a misplaced philosophical anthropology. In fact, Foucault stated that

Marx’s critique did nothing more than to have “stirred up a few waves…but they are no more

than storms in a children’s paddling pool.”268 He continues arguing that from now on, “all those

who wish to talk about man, about his liberation…who ask themselves about what man is in his

essence are philosophically laughable.”269 Yet it is Foucault himself who is naïve here, not

because of his view on the “essence of man,” for we have likewise been arguing that this is by no

means fixed and is open to historical movement. Rather, it is the fact that what Foucault offers us

is the same surface world of image and detached representation we found in modern bourgeois

thinking. Namely, in that what appears on the surface as “visible,” which is the bourgeois

construction of needs and therefore humanity, is just simply what “is.” History and human social

relations play only a secondary role in the matter, if any at all:

Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested...Disciplinary power,
on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it
subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their
visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is this fact of being constantly seen,
of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.270

Foucault’s argument here understandably has a great deal of appeal and for the most part

we are in agreement. It is the invisible personality that power exercises deep in the spaces of

267
Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm. Accessed: 7 March 2016.
268
Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 261-2.
269
Ibid., p. 342.
270
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 187.
 83

society that give it is truest authority. We have already mentioned the invisible gaze of the

factory clock as an example, but we can also think of the clandestine power of the National

Security Agency (NSA) in monitoring our private technological activity (internet, cell phone,

electronic purchases, etc.) and the violent potential of police to spring into repressive action in

order to deter a social movement. We have seen examples of this ranging from Birmingham,

Alabama, to Tiananmen Square, to Occupy Wall St. It is the invisible potential for power to

manifest itself in each of these situations that makes human beings into its effects, shapes their

actions and dialogues with each other, and sets the boundaries of their worldviews. But still the

primary question remains on the table. How does what Foucault describes as an invisible kind of

power gain its invisibility in the first place?

Marx purposefully and calculably gives us the concepts of exploitation, alienation,

ideology, and the like in order that we may understand the particular fields and movements of

power as an ‘ideal-real’ created by, yet at the same time structurally woven into the fabric of,

human relations. As Rehmann writes, “For Marx, relations of production were obviously not just

economic ‘facts’ but highly condensed and institutionalized power-relations. His critique of

political economy can be understood as an unveiling of the mechanisms of fetishism…by which

the cooperative power of the producers are alienated and handed over.”271 But for Foucault, this

is a nonstarter. For what he has in mind something, “simultaneously visible and

invisible…invested everywhere,”272 not in a relational sense, but in a transcendental one. Power

is a reality all its own which in turn structures the world in a way similar to the transcendental

subject of modernity. By completely denying the subject altogether273 in favor of power so

271
Rehmann, p. 203. Emphasis added.
272
Foucault, Dits et ecrits I 1954-1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), p. 1180.
273
Not only the transcendental subject of the bourgeois Enlightenment, but concrete social subject of Marx as
well.
 84

defined, we lose any ability to challenge it as ideology in order to develop historical alternatives.

According to John Sanbonmatsu, this negation from a transcendental subject to a transcendental

effect with no space for the human being “is itself a symptom” of bourgeois “reification.”274

To claim that Marx was ignorant of the phenomenon of power and its effects on subject

formation in capitalist society is simply wrong. The aim of his critique of political economy was

to deconstruct the entire apparatus in order to reveal the fetishism of the commodity, the

exploitation of producers, and the alienation of human beings by means of both the institutional

(i.e., material) and ideal power relations of the bourgeoisie. But it is one thing to carry on this

process of deconstruction of power for the purposes of reconstruction (the dialectical way), and

quite another to act as though power exists as some ontological entity on its own, perpetually

outside and underneath the human condition and its social relations. This is how Foucault would

seem to have it, and thus power is turned into its own fetish like religion, no different from its

friends the commodity or the bible.

Although Foucault never takes this explicit step, it seems implicitly that his notion of

power and the destruction of ideology--operant of “all things visible and invisible,”275which

operates in a transcendental way (there but unknowable)—is moving back toward the modern

society of the image dualism. The message is thus clear, what is, fully and precisely, is what

appears. And to be is to be individualistically constructed or represented. For post-structuralism,

as ideology goes by the way side, history quickly follows. We see this most prominently with the

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in his critique of “meta-narratives” which are aimed at

the destruction of the “dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning,” and likewise the

274
John Sanbonmatsu, The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political
Subject (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), p. 112.
275
See: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “What We Believe: The Nicene Creed,”
http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/. Accessed: 8 March 2016.
 85

“emancipation of the…working subject.”276 A basic feature of Lyotard’s project is the abolition

of history, insofar as history may in fact have any meaning or truth to it. It is an assault on any

and all components of hope, future anticipation, or possible teleology with the side effect of

laying impotent emancipatory social movements before they even begin.277 In an explicit step

toward the modernist infatuation with representationalism, Lyotard clokes himself in the

discourse of what might fairly be called the “transcendental nature” of language. He writes, “The

social bond seems to dissolve itself in this dissemination of language games. The social bond is

linguistic…It is a fabric formed by the intersection of…language.”278

But this is no better than a re-tread of modernist liberalism and does nothing more than to

deepen this notion of being trapped in a representational world. Language here seems to serve no

other purpose than that of representational signifier to be subjectively used for manipulation

much like Horkheimer’s enlightened savant, who cannot see her own ideological nature. This is a

phenomenon which Ilyenkov refers to as nothing better than “neo-positivism”:

The real problem of the cognition of the object has therefore been twisted around into a purely linguistic
problem – the problem of first assimilating available language (“the language of science”) and then of
assimilating “facts” in the forms of this (available) language…the Neopositivist program, if realized, would
mean the death of science – available knowledge would forever be “frozen” in the form of the available
language of science. And the object would forever be doomed to the pathetic role of an object of linguistic
manipulations and would not be present in the content of knowledge in any other form. It would not be
allowed in – it would be held back at the entrance to “knowledge” by the filters of Neopositivistic
“logic.”279

This notion of being caught in a perpetual nothingness of an image trap moves swiftly to

Jean Baudrillard’s collapse of reality into “hyper-reality” and “simulacra” in which our drift back

toward modernist representationalism becomes complete. Hyper-reality seems to structure the

276
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiii.
277
Rehmann, p. 214.
278
Lyotard, p. 40.
279
Ilyenkov, “Activity and Knowledge,” in E. V. Ilyenkov, Philosophy and Culture, trans. by Peter Moxhay (Moscow:
Politizdat, 1991), https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htm. Accessed: 8 March 2016.
 86

world transcendentally, much as the subject does for Kant, Being does for Heidegger, and power

does for Foucault, in the sense that it creates a world of nothing but representations. Yet for him,

it is a world that does not conceal anything. The image is all that there is. For example, the image

of Disneyland conceals only that the real America just is Disneyland, and the representation of

the prison conceals only that society is just a prison. The image is the reality.280 But Rehmann

rightly states that such a formation “reduces subjects to passive effects…with no chance to check

the fabricated images against other levels of [lived] experienced reality.”281

In a return to modernism, the subject itself is therefore nothing but an image. “Everything

that was directly lived has moved into representations,”282 and in a sense falls into the same deep

alienation described in the previous chapter. Whether the subject is lost in an abyss of the

ideology of the innate rights of man on the surface in the marketplace or as the side effect of the

ideology of detached power or hyper-reality, the ahistorical transcendental prevails and the

subject as representation remains along with the dualism of subject and object. The subject

oscillates between fatalistic determinacy (by capital or power or whatever) and a formalistic

detached and hollow freedom in which the subject creates itself as its own image. The

postmodern world of image shares a deep compatibility with modernism, as Ernst Bloch

describes: “It runs through large parts of modern thinking, easy, comfortable, faithless,”283

substituting one form of bourgeois ideology with another.

This compatibility is completely in step with an authoritative command that there must

not be any reality outside of the virtual appearance world of capitalism. In place of Marx’s

280
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheula Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1981), pp. 12 et sqq.
281
Rehmann, p. 215.
282
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Oakland: AK Press, 1983), Chapter 1, thesis 1.
283
Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. by Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1990), p. 257.
 87

radical historicizing and concretizing of the subject, the “Death of the Subject” philosophy often

plays directly into the hands of the most radical neo-liberal market ideology, which does nothing

to destroy capital as subject, but further solidifies it in the idea that humanity is a blank slate,

leaving it completely clear to construct itself in the market. Marx reminds us of this in the

Manuscripts, where he argues, “That which is for me is through the medium of money…that am

I, the possessor of money.”284 He continues: “Money’s properties are my properties and essential

powers…Thus what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I

am ugly, but I can by for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly…I am

stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid?”285

What is left, therefore, is the free manipulative ability to become our own brands, so to

speak, through personal lifestyle choices. A good example of this can be taken from current

discourse on race. If race is seen through the modern lens as a kind of personal predicate or in the

postmodern sense as a detached identity-image, in either respect, both are abstracted from any

concrete social determinates or historically specific social relations; what is left is a reactionary

difference. Capitalism in our current neo-liberal era pounces upon this. By honing in on the ideas

of personal predicates and identities as described, we are jettisoning ideas of relational and

historical determination for the multiplicity of permanent difference in which there are

competing claims and multiple identities. The problem, as Kenan Malik notes, is when all

differences and identities “are treated as equivalent, so that personal lifestyle preferences such as

‘musical styles’ are given the same weight and significance as…social products such as race and

class, while at the same time, each identity is conceived [fixed] in isolation from specific social

284
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 103. Emphasis added
285
Ibid.
 88

relations.”286 Thus real social relations, such as race, become not social relations at all but are

reduced to lifestyle choices and particular decisions made by individuals in their own

construction. In short, what it means to be Black, per se, is to brand oneself in the proper way.

As Robin Cohen observes, “an individual constructs and presents any one of a number of

possible social identities, depending on the situation…the individual pulls out a…religion, or an

ethnicity, [or] a lifestyle as the context deems a particular choice desirable or appropriate.”287

Under these auspices, the problem of race is simply is not a problem at all. Instead it is more akin

to a disagreement of aesthetic consumption practices or free market “tastes” which we are free to

purchase or not purchase at our will. And racial oppression would not be a deep institutional

problem woven into the fabric of society, but would rather be nothing more than a lack of

“tolerance” for the other and respect for their fragmented difference in free-market choices. This

blends smoothly with Frederic Jameson’s point about the discursive brand impulses of

postmodernity always nevertheless being defined into the dominant culture of capitalist

modernity as postmodernity’s brand of aesthetic taste production becomes increasingly

integrated into capital’s commodity production.288

But the most controversial convergence point of postmodern discourse/difference and

modern bourgeois society points us to the ideas of F.A. Hayek. Hayek, known for his views on

dispersed knowledge and incomplete information rather than the mainstream bourgeois theories

of market rationality, introduced his term Catallaxy to specify that market-order is a “system of

numerous [discursive]…economies,” without a single unitary goal. However, it (catallaxy) is still

an idea which nevertheless provides a special kind of spontaneous order “produced by the market

286
Kenan Malik, “The Mirror of Race,” in In Defense of History, p. 115.
287
Robin Cohen, Frontiers of Identity: The British and the Others (London: Longman, 1994) p. 205.
288
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991), pp. 4, 6.
 89

through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort, and contract.”289 Rehemann

notes here that by taking out any kind of “rational” planning, “the results of the market economy

become ‘fate,’”290 and subjects are thus fatally determined on the one hand, yet free consumers

and branders of themselves in the numerous discursive economies on the other. Hayek freely

admits this. He argues that when a series of pitfalls occur to a meritorious family or an individual

while more odious others prosper, it is strictly speaking an absurdity to claim any kind of

injustice in the matter because there is no place to assign blame “in a society of free men.”291

This impersonal order is administered dualistically in a representational manner much in the way

of power or transcendental things-in-themselves, since “in the cosmos of the market, we all

constantly receive benefits which we have not deserved in any moral sense,” and we are forced

“to accept equally undeserved diminutions of our income.”292 It is a situation where what appears

as a transcendental market doles out prosperity with a mind of its own and according to its own

good graces.

But Hayek goes further, telling us that this kind of subjective fatalism is perfectly

compatible with the kind of passionate individualistic activism required for the personal choice

and market-based image construction. This he calls the game of catallaxy which involves dueling

aspects of skill and fate,293 which brings us to a problem of neoliberal postmodernism that takes

us back to the flaw pointed out by Lukács which likewise lies at the base of Enlightenment

modernism. Namely, the flaw of oscillation between fatalism and formalism and the

289
F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. II: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976), pp. 108-109.
290
Rehmann, p. 278.
291
Hayek, p. 69.
292
Ibid., p. 94. It should be pointed out, that while I do believe there are similarities here between how Hayek
describes the market society and Foucault’s description of the dissemination of power, this view is still somewhat
one-sided. Namely in the fact that while Foucault ultimately sought to undermine and deconstruct power (at least
implicitly), Hayek does no such thing. Rather, he views the matter in a glowingly positive light all the way through.
293
Ibid., pp.71, 115.
 90

impossibility (due to the dualism of subject and object) of moving beyond the instrumental

rationality of applying the proper laws and of correct calculation. Hayek’s metaphor of the game

thus reduces the potentially rich human capacities for social praxis to discursive capacities to

construct while at the same time making the restrictions invisible, leaving only an image in their

wake. Social justice is non-existent, a metaphysical fallacy. It is to be reduced to the skills and

the cleverness of individuals in the market-game and is concerned only with the “rules of

individual conduct.”294 This is an effect that is not just meant to be tolerated but is openly

advocated and praised “in order to produce a functioning order, capable of maintaining the

apparatus of civilization which it presupposes.”295 The “barracks like discipline” described by

Dunayevskaya thus makes its return.

We now return to the original question of the chapter. Namely: For all of its critiques of

modernism, does postmodernism ever truly escape it? I have argued that it does not. And to the

rejoinder question: Then what comes after postmodernism? My answer would be, in general,

more modernism. But to be crystal clear, the answer would be neoliberalism, where

Enlightenment transcendental humanism finds a unique home together with postmodern “death

of the subject” anti-humanism. Why? Because neither side grasps the ideological nature of their

own project, whether it be a subscription to transcendental innate rights or humanity as a side

effect of something else (power, simulacra, etc.). Neither side can overcome the perverse relation

of the dualism of subject from object, thus leading to an essentialist-universalist split between the

transcendental on the one hand, and things as they appear to us on the other. The Enlightenment

modernist cannot grasp how the dialectical movement of the social relations of her philosophical

articulation works against her, such that the subject works at the behest of a ghostly alien

294
Ibid., p. 101.
295
Ibid., p. 98. Emphasis added.
 91

objectivity (capital). To their credit the postmodernists do seem to grasp this much. The subject

in the mirror is not as it appears. Yet they to fail to get a grip on the same social relations and the

way in which the ideal moves in society and therefore only end up replacing one dehistoricized,

ideological transcendental with another. A transcendental which Marx and Engels write in the

German Ideology, “hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with an invisible hand

allots fortune and misfortune to men.”296 It is truly the religion of everyday life:

victory over whom really means being worsted, where to have attained one result is really to lose it in the
opposite. Consciousness of life, of its existence and action, is merely pain and sorrow over this existence
and activity; for therein consciousness finds only consciousness of its opposite as its essence — and of its
own nothingness.297

296
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 54.
297
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 127.
 92

Chapter VII: Capturing the Revolutionary Subject: Or, the New Humanism

“The task that confronts our age, it appears to this writer, is, first, to recognize that there is a
movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to
work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it. A new relationship of
theory to practice, a new appreciation of ‘Subject,’ of live human beings struggling to
reconstruct society, is essential.”298 – Raya Dunayevskaya

In his 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” French philosopher and

structural Marxist Louis Althusser developed his idea of Ideological State Apparatuses within

which lay his idea of interpellation, both of which are basic to his broader theory of ideology.

Now, this thesis is not one on the merits of structural Marxism,299 although it should be pointed

out that Althusser and his philosophy are no friends of ours. However, beginning here with this

small portion of his thought ironically provides us with an interesting starting point for moving

beyond the Enlightenment and postmodern quagmire and on a path toward a new, revolutionary

subjectivity.

The basics of Althusser’s theory proceed like this. Every society is made up of both

Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) each of which

participate in the spread and maintenance of the dominant social ideology. RSAs are thought to

lie directly in the public realm and are represented by the traditional institutions of power, such

as the state and its various mechanisms like police, military, and the judicial system. ISAs, on the

other hand, occupy the more private and subtle institutions of society. We might call these the

institutions of “everyday” civil life such as schools, churches, news media, political and civic

groups, and the like. Interpellation is the term Althusser uses to describe the actual process by

which these apparatuses, as the material embodiments of ideology, disseminate their

298
Raya Dunayevskaya, “Marx’s Humanism Today,” in Socialist Humanism, ed. by Erich Fromm (New York:
Doubleday, 1965), https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1965/marx-humanism.htm. Accessed:
13 March, 2016.
299
Althusser is considered the primary thinker within this field.
 93

“knowledge” to us and by doing so actually constitute the very nature of our subjectivity. In

short, subjects are created through a process of interpellation. As Althusser argues, “all ideology

hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects,” in which “ideology ‘acts’ or

‘functions’ in such way that it … ‘transforms’ the individual into subjects.”300 The entire process

is completed by the act of hailing, which is a non-specific and unconscious process. The famous

example Althusser gives is of a police officer hailing an individual on the street: “Hey you!

There!” As the individual addressee turns to answer the hail she becomes a subject, because the

individual realizes the call was addressed to her and is now “subject” to the particular ideology

as transmitted by the ISAs or RSAs.

Individuals are thus not specifically active agents per se, but mere structural effects of

social forces, in this case, the material structures of the state and civil society. 301 For Althusser,

this ideologically based subject formation shares much with Foucault and likewise with the

modernist idea that history is in general without dialectic and is “eternal, exactly like the

unconscious, it is omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form.”302 For

Althusser, ideology takes on a decidedly neutral tenor in that there is no possible way for human

beings to escape it. Instead, we merely jump from one ideological structure to another regardless

of our place and time in the world. It is seemingly impossible for subjects as unconsciously and

transcendentally formed to “speak back,” to their interpellations. Ideology is therefore able to

continually perpetuate itself.

300
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans.
by Ben Brewer (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. Accessed: 10 March 2016
301
Ibid.
302
Ibid.
 94

This position is quite different than our historicized, dialectical, relational, view of

ideology. However, as mentioned above, it provides us with a starting point for a way out. This

is because in examining the roots of ideology in social relations (“ideal-reals”), we do think that

subjects can speak back to and revolutionize interpellations. In that, in their fetishized

subjugation to capital as subject there is a requirement for us as attaching “subjects” to

misconceive the socio-historical aspect of our own subjectivity and thus our own potential for

dialectical change. As Rehmann points out, the equation is a “recognition=misrecognition”

scenario because we as small subjects seem to recognize ourselves in the interpellation (i.e., we

recognize the process) yet misrecognize the full scope and power of our alienation and

subservience to market relations. A full recognition “could in fact threaten their practical

capacity to act,” throwing the entire Enlightenment idea that “every man is the architect of his

own future” into serious jeopardy.303 For the Althusserian, this is a dead end because he,

alongside the mediated relation in which Foucault and Hayek ironically conspire, has taken

history, relation, and dialectic out of the equation. Not so for us, because in the contradictory

movement of recognition and misrecognition, in which subjects are pulled back and forth

between the fatalism of capital and mere formalism of their own agency, the space for

revolutionary potential emerges from the background.

In order to bring this line of reasoning more sharply into focus, we can consider Italian

philosopher Antonio Gramsci and his ideas of cultural hegemony and common sense. Much like

the form of bourgeois society (in regards to our discussion, the commodity form in particular),

Gramsci viewed subjectivity as an opposition amongst itself, a historical human archeological

site endowed with diverse and contradictory layers but at the same time endowed with a

303
Rehmann, p. 287.
 95

structured common sense, transported directly from the past into which one is born into. This

common sense has real efficacy and movement in culture and society, whether one recognizes it

or not. In order to draw a comparison, consider again Marx’s introductory statement made in the

Eighteenth Brumaire: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain

of the living.” Gramsci’s idea of a common sense revealing of a lifeworld takes on a hegemonic

effect, thus reducing the potential many-sided dimensions to one. One that is, clearly enough,

ideologically compatible with the horizon of the times. This Gramsci calls the “naïve philosophy

of the mass” and the “religion of the subaltern” which becomes, amongst those subjects it

saturates, “a cause of passivity.”304

In reality common sense, like capital, is a battle field of contradictory tendencies. We

have already argued that capital, abstract labor time, and value are nothing more than ideal forms

of human social relations, which have become detached “socio-objective” subjects woven into

the fabric of culture due in large part to the bourgeois dualism of subject from object. But

Gramsci tells us that this contradiction is precisely where the battlefield lies, in that common

sense leads to a one dimensional co-existence between two internally contradictory modes of

being. He writes that “It signifies that the social group [i.e., colonized groups] in question may

indeed have its own conception of the world...a conception which manifests itself in action…But

this same group has, for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopted a

conception which is not its own…and it affirms this conception verbally and believes itself to be

following it, because this is this is the conception which it follows in ‘normal times.’”305 Gramsci

goes on to say, that this dual existence of implicitly active human being on the one hand, and

304
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. by Qunitin Hoarse and Geoffrey Nowell
Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 336-337.
305
Ibid., p. 327. Emphasis added.
 96

explicitly passive appendages to common sense (i.e., capital as subject) on the other, “holds

together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of the will…often

powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does

not permit any action.”306

Although similar in some respects to Althusser’s idea of interpellation, Gramsci’s idea of

the human being as a historical house divided amongst itself (i.e., the dual consciousness)

contrasts directly with structural Marxism. This gives credence to our earlier intimation that even

in the most closed of systems, human beings can and do in fact “speak back” to their masters and

open the space to reveal the presence of the highest contradiction even within the most absolute

form. Marx and Engels spell this out in The German Ideology, writing that the “subsuming of

individuals under the class brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc.”307 Yet along

with Gramsci and contra Althusser, they are very quick to point out both the historical and

dialectical character of the problem as well as the deep contradictions enveloped in the absolute

form:

In the course of historical development, and precisely through the fact that within the division of labour
social relations inevitably take on an independent existence, there appears a cleavage in the life of each
individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the
conditions pertaining to it…The difference between the private individual and the class individual, the
accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of class,
which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie…The difference…comes out primarily in the antagonism
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.308

Gramsci goes on to say that the necessary prescription is not a stagnant philosophizing or a

passive acceptance but a revolutionary philosophy of praxis, in which the human being as subject

is conceived of as a historical process and a “series of active relations”309 which are not

306
Ibid., p. 333.
307
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 86.
308
Ibid., p. 87.
309
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 352.
 97

mechanical common sense but have become consciously revolutionary. Gramsci described this

philosophy of praxis as a “historical category” of a “movement in continuous development,”310

which therefore cannot “separate the being from thinking, the human being from nature, the

activity from matter, the subject from the object.”311

Perhaps the best way to describe this move is that of the potential for immanent negation.

Hegel offers us an explanation of this potential in the Science of Logic, writing that the “turning

point of the movement of the Notion…the dialectical soul that everything true possesses and

through which alone it is true; for on this subjectivity alone rests the sublating of the opposition

between Notion and reality, and the unity that is the truth.”312 Dunayevskaya adds to this in her

essay “Hegel’s Absolute as New Beginning.” There, she argues that in the movement of

negativity which reaches its most closed position in the Absolute nevertheless there inheres

within it the “impulse to transcend” including “the system itself” in the intimation of bringing

about “totally new beginnings.”313 So alive is the so called Absolute with the negativity of

contradiction—the contraction between the theoretical and practical, “notion” and “reality”—that

it must self-develop and overcome itself. “The notion is not merely soul [i.e., ideal’] but free

subjective Notion that is for itself and therefore possesses personality.”314 To be carried off

within the movement of dialectic is the first experience of the plunge to freedom: “it becomes a

totally new foundation—absolute negation.”315 It is in the movement to transcendence in social

relations of the dualism of subject and object, or ideal and real, which is apparent in both modern

310
Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, four volumes, critical edition by the Gramsci Institute, ed. by Valerio Gerratana
(Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 1456.
311
Ibid., p. 1457.
312
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 835.
313
Dunayevskaya, “Hegel’s Absolute as New Beginning,” in The Power of Negativity, p. 178.
314
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 466.
315
Dunayevskaya, “Hegel’s Absolute as New Beginning,” p. 179.
 98

and postmodern thought, the new beginning in thought and in actuality in praxis occurs.

Dunayevskaya calls this Marx’s “subversion,” by which she means “the realization of

philosophy as a new Humanism, the unity of the ideal and the real, of theory and practice…of

philosophy and revolution.”316

We can see again the connection between Marx’s idea of capital as falsely appearing

subject in bourgeois society and Hegel’s development of the Notion toward the Absolute Idea,

especially in the self-perpetuation of the commodity fetish. This is correct but it is also one-sided

because Marx presents capital as an inherently two dimensional category that is driven to self-

movement much in the same way Hegel’s absolute is driven above: by containing the highest,

most carcinogenic negativity within it. Capital is plagued by the internal demand to increase

material production on the one hand and the perpetual drive to accumulate surplus value on the

other. As Peter Hudis writes, “The former compels capital to constantly reduce the proportion of

living labour at the point of production, while the latter makes capital dependent on such labour

for its reproduction.” He goes on, adding the concluding remark, “The logic of capital presents

us with a system riven with such internal instability that capital intimates a realm beyond capital,

wherein human power is its own end.”317 Therefore, tracing out the category of capital to its

conclusion does not set us in the restful place of a closed off system but instead points directly to

the potential for a movement beyond. To this Hegel writes, “The pure Idea, in which the

determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself raised to the level of Notion, is an absolute

liberation.”318 Marx responds, “The positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic [are]... Annulling

as an objective movement of retracing the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed

316
Ibid., p. 180.
317
Peter Hudis, “Death of the Death of the Subject,” http://libcom.org/library/death-of-subject-marxist-humanism.
Accessed: 14 March 2016.
318
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 843.
 99

within the estrangement concerning the appropriation of objective essence through the

annulment [transcendence] of its estrangement...into the real appropriation of his objective

essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world.”319

It should now be clear that the best way to calibrate Marx’s presentation of capital as

subject is as a play in two concurrent and parallel acts. One as a great self-perpetuating fetish

which serves to incorporate us as “small subjects” into its movement, but secondly as a dialectic

of the deepest negativity—a dialectic of liberation which is to serve as the ground for the

struggle for real human emancipation “wherein human power is its own end.” But this idea

cannot be accomplished from a kind of enlightened subjectivity operating from outside with a

God’s eye view of things. Hudis states this clearly: “Commodity fetishism cannot be penetrated

by enlightened critique which assumes a privileged standpoint outside the value-form; nor can it

be stripped away by pointing to a hidden essence obscured by the illusion of fetishism.”320

Instead, and because capital is the illusionary subject of bourgeois society, the commodity fetish

can only be overcome by the emergence of new forms of new social relations which reveal the

secret of the fetish. But to do this requires a new form of struggle, and thus a new form of

humanity—a new humanism. In this enterprise we do well to follow Argentine revolutionary

Che Guevara, who writes in his essay “Socialism and Man in Cuba” that “To build communism

it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and

woman,”321 which brings us finally back to Dunayevskaya’s original question. Namely, what

kind of labor?

319
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 120.
320
Hudis, “Death of the Death of the Subject,” http://libcom.org/library/death-of-subject-marxist-humanism.
321
Che Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” in The Che Reader (North Melbourne, AU: Ocean Press, 2005),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm. Accessed: 14 March 2016.
 100

We have already discussed how important the category of labor and its alienated

movement as it develops in ideological social relations is to Marx’s philosophy. But based on

what we have written above, it would be wrong to assume that the human labor process (carried

out by real human beings) is completely enveloped in capital’s self-perpetuating valorization

process. Instead, capital must always confront a certain transhistorical nature of labor. Capital

requires living labor from existentially living human beings. Beings whose appearance, in

whatever form, carry a transhistorical nature forward (in terms of labor), in that in whatever

historical condition capital may find them, it still does in fact find them. This points us to the

inherent struggle, no matter how hidden, between that which strives for the ultimate reification

and commodification of everything existing (capital) and that which is not simply just another

“thing” for the simple fact that it has the capability of revolutionary resistance, namely the

human being. Hudis writes that Capital’s inability to totally encapsulate the human being, “flows

not from social and political aspects extraneous to the capital-relation, but from its very

foundation.”322

So to follow Dunayevskaya, we experience the plunge to freedom, which “becomes a

totally new foundation.” Or as Marx writes, “The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the

same course as self-estrangement.”323And likewise, the concept of labor is the crucial one in

overcoming alienation and in developing dialectically the new historical conception of the world

for a radical subject. For it is through the movement, negation, and sublation of labor in its

alienated form into its opposite positive form, namely, unalienated human labor, where we find

the movement of praxis and the overcoming betweeen the dualism of subject and object. It is

322
Hudis, “Death of the Death of the Subject,” http://libcom.org/library/death-of-subject-marxist-humanism.
323
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 82.
 101

through labor that human beings related to nature as natural beings and it is through labor that

human beings relate to each other as social beings—in mutual recognition, a unity in difference.

According to Marx in the Manuscripts, human beings form a “direct relationship of

labour to its produce…the relationship of the worker to the object of his production. The

relationship of the man of means to the object of production and to production itself is only a

consequence of this first relationship.” 324 What we are to glean from this is that, in its

unalientated form, the relationship of humanity to its labor and the object of labor (i.e., objects of

nature) are natural. It is through this dialectical relationship that human individuals strive for and

attempt to achieve universality—not in the form of unfolding spirit as Hegel has it, but through

active human relations engaged with nature and each other. Marx states that “Man is a species

being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his

object…But…because he treats himself as the actual, living species…as a universal and

therefore a free being.”325

Thus universality is not something fixed and given, but something that must have room to

move. It must unfold itself and be worked up teleologically in the relations of people. “It is just

in the working up of the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species

being. This production is his active species life. Through and because of this production, nature

appears as his work and his reality.”326 We should avoid at all costs making this out to be either a

dualistic relationship in which human beings contemplate or work-up objects detached from

them (in alienation) or where they actively impose themselves as colonizers. Even if there is no

direct and immediate unity between human beings and the natural world (i.e., a relationship of

324
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 73.
325
Ibid., p.75.
326
Ibid., p. 76.
 102

literal immediacy), there is nevertheless a dialectical relation mediated through the category of

human labor, such that as nature unfolds itself so too does humanity unfold itself. Thus human

beings are truly natural beings:

The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his
inorganic body…Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature that is, in so far as it is not itself the human
body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous
intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that
nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.327

In sublating the dualism of subject-object through unalienated labor, we also move

beyond the dualism of subjects separated from other subjects. In other words, the alienation of

human beings from each other as isolated monads imbued with the transcendental rights of “free

men,” as Hayek put it. In the movement toward positive transcendence, in Marxian-Hegelian

terminology, the negation of the negation,328 humanity is the production of humanity, both of

ourselves and of others. It is the process of coming-to-be. Marx writes, “To be objective, natural,

and sensuous, and at the same time have object, nature, and sense outside oneself, or oneself to

be an object, nature, and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.”329 He continues,

arguing that “A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being…A

being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an

object for some third being has no being for its object.”330 Thus we find the real, concrete,

tendency toward unity among ourselves, others, and nature such that we exist at one and the

same time both as subject and simultaneously as objects.

Here we find a source for the leap toward universality; the idea of a unity in difference

rather that the dueling obliterations of difference of modern and postmodern thinking in which

327
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 75
328
For our purposes, negation of the negation refers to a new birth of subjectivity out of postmodern times,
whereas postmodernism refers to the first negation—in Marxian term what we might call a “crude” negation.
329
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 115.
330
Ibid., p. 116.
 103

modernism destroys otherness in the name of universal equality while postmodern universalizes

and totalizes difference. Either way, the end result is much the same: radical atomic

individualism. Individuals form a unity through their difference in a radical form of dialectic,

inter-subjective self-consciousness. Hegel writes, “Each knows itself recognized in the other free

man, and is aware of this in so far as it recognizes the other and knows him to be free. This

universal reappearance of self-consciousness...is the form of consciousness which lies at the root

of all true mental or spiritual life – in family, fatherland, state, and of all virtues, love, friendship,

valour, honour, fame.”331 This can only occur under the condition of real unalienated relations of

human beings (individuals) to each other, to a particular society, and to universal nature.

We can see this by considering how an object of labor, being the creation of an individual

person, is thus the direct embodiment of her individuality. Her subjectivity is contained in the

object such that the object would not exist without her having created it. Yet this object, as both

an object of nature (standing on its own) and the embodiment of her subjectivity, is connected to

others in that it is seen as the embodiment of her subjectivity (through her labor) by others.

Others recognize her and the uniqueness of her individuality as embodied in this natural object of

her own creation. As Marx argues, “For this third object [i.e., the other person, another

subjectivity] I am thus an other reality than it; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being

which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists.”332 It is in

this unity, therefore, that we achieve the subjectivity of species being in that human beings seek

to confirm and to manifest themselves in their acts of coming-to-be through their labors and in

their objects of labor. Yet this only gives away its presupposition, that we must be in a position

331
Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, trans. by
William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971),
https://marxists.anu.edu.au/reference/archive/hegel/works/sp/suconsci.htm. Accessed: 15 March 2016
332
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 116.
 104

to receive confirmation from others through their own subjectivity. It is the subjectivity of our

objective powers, in that we subjectively create other objects because we ourselves are

established in the same fashion.

Thus “both the material of labour and man as subject, are [at the same time] the point of

departure as well as the result of the movement.”333 We are presented with an intermediated,

interrelationary moving trinity of relations with individual persons, society, and nature each

forming a corner of a triangle. But the crucial point is how each side presupposes the other

through a new kind of labor and that “the social character is the general character of the whole

movement just as society produces man as man, so is society produced by him.”334 We all

recognize that each person is an individual, and for all of the discussion against individualism it

is important that note that none of it is meant to deny a person her individuality. Yet, it should be

clear that through this discussion that each person in their individuality is nevertheless, as Marx

puts it, “just as much the totality…the subjective existence of thought and experienced society

present for itself.”335

In his work “Comments on James Mill,” Marx offers arguably his clearest, most

complete idea for what this mutually recognized unity in difference looks like, in which each

other remains an “other” in her individuality yet at the same time forms a many sided dialectical

unity with each “other” as a species being. Because of this, it is worth quoting him at some

length:

Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways
affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its
specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity,
but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be
objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my
product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my

333
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 85.
334
Ibid.
335
Ibid., p. 86.
 105

work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object
corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator
between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a
completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know
myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I
would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would
have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products
would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature. This relationship would
moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours. 336

This movement of the unfolding negative toward positive transcendence and

many-sided unity is what Marx and Hegel term “the negation of the negation,” and what

Marx alone calls communism. Though communism is not the final resting place (i.e., the

end of history) of the new, dialectical humanism, it does represent the positive

transcendence of human self-estrangement and the real appropriation of humanity by

human beings by way of new social relations and a new kind of labor. Marx stated in the

“Theses on Feuerbach” that “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single

individual. In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”337 Thus communism

represents the unfolding of human social relations and conditions of possibility for a

genuine resolution of the conflicts between humans and nature, humans and each other,

between existence and essence, freedom and necessity, individual and species.338 But

Marx is quick to remind us that this is no mere theoretical articulation. It is a theoretical

articulation which must also be accentuated through revolutionary praxis by the now

established revolutionary subjectivity. Marx writes that “Man must prove the truth, that

is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over

the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic

336
Marx, “Comment on James Mill,” in Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (Erste Abteilung, Band 3, Berlin, 1932), trans.
by Clemens Dutt for the Collected Works, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/
337
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 145.
338
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 84.
 106

question.”339 It is therefore not enough, as we described above, to bestow enlightened

theory to break the commodity fetish. Rather, as Hudis writes:

The only thing which can is a form of praxis which combines practical action with the subjectivity of
purpose: The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process…until it becomes
production by freely associated men….The absolute epitome of alienation, commodity fetishism is
counterposed to an absolutely opposed form of human praxis, the struggle for a new kind of labour by
freely associated men.340

We now have the capability to speak about how revolutionary subjectivity emerges

dialectically from the given negativity in a leap toward universality (universal humanity) rather

than being something universally “foundational” that was simply being concealed (modernism),

or that was always an unknowable other (postmodernism). A classic example in the United

States is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s.341 We have already

discussed a postmodern and neoliberal idea of the question(s) “what does it mean to be black?”

“Or what is blackness?” But in this context we see a very different idea come forth as emergence

out of and within the context of a historically moving event (the Civil Rights Movement). Here,

what it means to be Black is to embrace the idea of black subjectivity both in consciousness and

in practice in the combination of revolutionary praxis.

We see this in the effect of the positivity of the new humanism emerging from the

negativity of the old. Negatively, we see what it means to be black in America (i.e., blackness) as

the isolated individualism of a forced otherness from the outside. Fanon spells out in great detail

in The Wretched of the Earth that the Enlightenment idea of humanism was achieved only

through individualizing, segregating, and dehumanizing the non-western Other. Europeans, or in

339
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 144.
340
Hudis, “Death of the Death of the Subject,” http://libcom.org/library/death-of-subject-marxist-humanism
341
I use the term event in this context somewhat loosely and outside the norm in that traditionally we tend think
of an event as a something that is singular, fleeting, and momentary. Whereas something like the Civil Rights
Movement was a decade-plus movement with many different, many sided moments of peaks and valleys, starts
and stops, achievements and failures, etc.
 107

this case white Americans, only become human in relation to their “non-human” counterparts.

He argues, “The colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse

on the universal…The colonial world is a Manichaean world. The colonist is not content with

physically limiting the space of the colonized…[but] the colonist turns the colonized into the

quintessence of evil.”342 Fanon continues, “In the colonial context the colonist only quits

undermining the colonized once the latter have proclaimed loud and clear that white values reign

supreme.”343

Furthermore, the path to humanity is through that of imitation, reminding us of the

famous American saying, “Kill the Indian, save the Man.” This humanism is devoid of all

meaning, which led Sartre to comment in the introduction to Fanon’s work, “we must confront

an unexpected site: the striptease of our humanism. Not a pretty site in its nakedness: nothing but

a dishonest ideology, an exquisite justification for plundering.”344 But from the movement of

negativity, we see the seed of the positive transcendence in the seizing not of the individual but

of the leap toward the new in the event of the social movement (in this case the movement for

civil rights). The taking of positive consciousness therefore has nothing at all to do with

individual “choice” but has to do with the relations of the social individual to the universal in the

form of the event. This is the spirit in which Fanon writes, “Let us endeavor to invent a man in

full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.”345 It is not a stretch, therefore, to

imagine someone of the era saying to us something to the effect of, “I did not know exactly who

I was or what ‘blackness’ meant until I joined the movement and participated in a sit-in, or a

protest, or a march, and was beaten and arrested. But now I understand and I embrace it.” It is as

342
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 6.
343
Ibid., p. 8.
344
Jean Paul Sartre, “Preface to Wretched of the Earth,” in Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. lvii-lviii.
345
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 236.
 108

Hegel says, “In the relation of inner and outer, the essential moment of this emerges, namely,

that its determinations are posited as being in negative unity in such a manner that each

immediately is not only its other but also the totality of the whole.”346 Hegel continues: “The

Essence must appear or shine forth.” But, “Essence accordingly is not something beyond or

behind appearance, but – just because it is the essence which exists – the existence is

Appearance.”347

Marx, in arguably the most famous line in his entire corpus, wrote with Engels in The

Communist Manifesto that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles.”348 But what exactly does that mean? It does not just simply “happen,” but it must

move dialectically. The leap to positivity, therefore, is a leap to a new “universal” humanist

subjectivity negating the barren individualism of bourgeois society. It is the leap from a fractured

individual to a many-sided and multifaceted universal. We can now bring the idea of the subject

back around to one of the original ideas of the thesis at large, namely the idea of a historical,

relational category which itself emerges out of the idea of the essence becoming actual

appearance (as with the Civil Rights Movement example). If what was described as essence is

the process of “peeling back the onion,” so to speak, in order to discover “the formation of a new

concept, an adequate concept befitting a unique form of social practice,”349 then what we have

here in the relational concept or category is a break with or sublation of this toward something

new.

346
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 526.
347
Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slappear.htm#SL131n. Emphasis added.
348
Marx, The Communist Manifesto, p. 473.
349
Blunden, Concepts: A Critical Approach, p. 125.
 109

As Andy Blunden writes, “The Concept is a unity of Being and Essence, because it

makes sense of the original observations…It is there, immediately, not different from Being, but

along with all conflicting factions, it is now self-conscious. In that sense it is a negation of the

negation…it is both mediated and immediate.”350 The new self-consciousness of which Blunden

speaks can be thought of as the coming to a realization of the real socio-relational aspect of

bourgeois society, which nevertheless wears the mask of fetishism and individualist ideology. It

is thus a many-sided relational whole that needs only to develop its radical potentiality through

new forms of social relations and a philosophy of revolutionary praxis. The new humanist

subject is therefore not thrown off for something else in its development, rather it needs only to

concretize itself through its own dialectical movement.

Hegel points this out to us, arguing that “The onward movement of the notion is no

longer either a transition into, or a reflection of something else, but Development. For in the

notion, the elements distinguished are without more ado at the same time declared to be identical

with one another and with the whole, and the specific character of each is a free being of the

whole notion.”351

Lastly, we are now prepared to discuss the relationship of the leap toward the new

humanism and revolutionary subjectivity, the development of it as a concept, and the Hegelian

triadic idea of Universal-Particular-Individual (designated by the letters: U-P-I). In his use of

these three terms, Hegel presents us with a complex system of relations in the triadic form of of

three syllogisms, in which each of the three represent the middle term of the remaining two, and

therefore each serves as a presupposition of the others. Hegel tells us “The essential feature of

350
Ibid., p. 127. Emphasis added.
351
Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slsubjec.htm#SL161 accessed: 16 March 2016
 110

the syllogism is the unity of the extremes, the middle term which unites them, and the ground

which supports them.”352 So, for example, I and U connected by P, U and P connected by I, and

P and I connected by U. These three moments form an organic, many sided totality such that

each can truly only be understood thanks to the other two. Blunden gives us a clue to Hegel’s

meaning:

The structure of the Subject is Individual-Universal-Particular, which are referred to as moment of the
notion (not successive stages) That is, the subject entails a specific, all sided relation between individual
[an individual human person] finite, the particular norms of on-going activity and social relations entailed
in relevant social practice; and the universal, eternal products and symbols through which the Subject is
represented.353

The first form of the syllogism is I-P-U in which the individual is connected to the

extreme of a universal idea through a particular manifestation to which the individual can

achieve its needs. Here Hegel writes that:

the individual, which as such is infinite self-relation and therefore would be merely inward, emerges by
means of particularity into existence as into universality…conversely the individual, in separating itself into
its determinateness as a particularity, is in this separation a concrete individual and, as the relation of the
determinateness to itself, a universal, self-related individual, and consequently is also a true individual. 354

The second form is U-I-P. In this instance, the abstract universal must be concretized so as to

have real movement and thus needs to be connected to particular manifestations (for example,

through a social movement which individuals have initiated) in which individual people

participate. Hegel says, “The specific and objective meaning of this syllogism is that the

universal is not in and for itself a determinate particular…but is one of its species through the

medium of individuality…the particular likewise is not immediately and in and for itself the

universal, but the negative unity strips it of its determinateness and thereby raises it into

universality.”355 Our earlier example of the Civil Rights Movement works well here too, as the

352
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 665.
353
Blunden, Concepts: A Critical Approach, p. 128.
354
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 667.
355
Ibid., p. 675.
 111

abstract universal which arises from the movement gains particular concretization through

individuals realizing their plunge toward a new subjectivity as embodied in the particular

movement (e.g., the Black Panther Party).

The third and final syllogism of the triad takes the form P-U-I. In this moment, the

Universal concept (communism, or new humanism), as the mediating term, consists neither in

the institutional or particular manifestation, nor the individuals, but instead both at the same

time:

The middle term of this syllogism is indeed the unity of the extremes, but a unity in which abstraction is
made from their determinateness; it is the indeterminate universal. But since this universal is at the same
time distinguished as abstract from the extremes as determinate, it is itself still a determinate relatively to
them, and the whole is a syllogism whose relation to its Notion has now been considered. 356

Tombazos adds to this by writing, “The universal is, therefore, present in the two extremes of the

syllogism, as individual subjective volition, on the one hand, and as concrete [particular]

activity…on the other.” He continues: “Individuals, far from getting lost in universal principles

recognize in these universal principles their own rational nature, thanks to which life in society

[the particular], or the effective satisfaction of physical and spiritual needs, is realised in a

complete and developed form.”357

As Marxists, however, we are continually pressed to remember that this emergent “ideal”

category of the new subject with the three moments of U-P-I is always tied to the social relations

of human beings and therefore exists in the “space” between them. Marx wrote in the

introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “It is not the consciousness

of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their

consciousness.”358 We should think of the matter in terms of a social subject which gains its

356
Ibid., p. 678.
357
Tombazos, p. 139.
358
Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition, p. 4.
 112

understanding through the universal concept or idea. What we have, therefore, is an idea which

takes on the form, or is embodied in the form of human activity as it realizes itself in the natural

world, “we take the concept as one element in the consciousness and activity of an

individual.”359

So to answer the question, how does a universal, such as Communism, exist in the world?

It emerges from revolutionary subjects. But how do subjects become revolutionary? Through the

emergence and consciousness of their own development in revolutionary Communism. Each

therefore, serves as a presupposition of the other. The Universal is a principle with its own

subsistence which individuals engage with by means of their particular relations. But at the same

time it is nothing other than those particular social activities of social individuals. And the

particularity differs from individuality in that it belongs to ongoing social forms and practice

which will ultimately outlive and transcend any one singular individual and which therefore bind

it into a historical social fabric.360 This is, in snapshot form, what we mean when we use the

term philosophy of praxis in the leap toward positivity of the new humanism, in that human

beings take on the embodiment of this new emergent universal. Yet at the same time, they

themselves, in their individuality, are this universal. As Dunayevskaya puts it, the new social

individuals are “made concrete and thereby extended Marx’s most abstract theories of alienated

labor and the quest for universality…the movement from practice to theory, and with it, a new

unity of manual and mental labor in the worker.”361 In this respect, we can think of human beings

in relation to society as universal and class as particular, not in the sense that each individual

meets certain qualifications or attributes and can thus be subsumed under a category “social

359
Blunden, “Hegel: The Subject as Concept” (2006) http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/hegel-logic.htm.
Accessed: 16 March 2016.
360
Blunden, Concepts, p. 153.
361
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, p. 276.
 113

class,” but instead thinking of a class consciousness as it emerges from ideological social

relations. Marx argues that “The role of liberator can, therefore, pass successively in a dramatic

movement to different classes…Until finally it reaches the class which achieves the goal of social

freedom; no longer assuming certain conditions external to man…which does not claim a

particular wrong, but wrong in general.”362

Although I have purposefully avoided the question, it is ironically for the best that we

close here with Marx making an explicit moral claim. In order to establish a space for a new

humanism, the revolutionary social subject, through the particular manifestation of the

proletariat, must not just address particular wrongs but wrong in general. He says that such a

subject and such a class not only should participate in this revolutionary redress of grievances,

but that they collectively must do so, “with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those

conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.”363 To this, we

wholeheartly agree. For we are not just engaged here in offering an objective report, or a

description of empty forms or concrete situations, but are situating ourselves directly within

living and moving humanity. As Guevara writes, “I am not interested in dry economic socialism.

We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation…If communism isn't

interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a

revolutionary way of life.”364 Pointing this out also gives us a reinvigorated definition of Marx’s

evoking of the categorical imperative, and allows to once and for all discard Kant’s version,

which is at best a useless transcendental abstraction or at worst a total myth. Instead, we replace

it with an imperative to action, what Dunayevskaya reminds us as the movement from practice to

362
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” p. 64.
363
Ibid., p. 60.
364
Che Guevara, in Paul Hollander, The Many Faces of Socialism: Comparative Sociology, and Politics (Piscataway,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983), p. 224.
 114

theory to philosophy through revolutionary praxis—the philosophical unity of practice and

theory. Only then can we begin to talk about what Guevara describes as a realm where “Human

beings-as-commodities cease to exist,” and “Individuals start to see themselves reflected in their

work and to understand their full stature as human beings.”365 In Volume III of Capital, Marx

calls this movement of a revolutionary imperative the movement toward the realm of freedom. It

is a realm which cannot be here, in Enlightenment bourgeois society, but instead, “lies by its

very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper…Freedom, in this sphere, can

consist only in this, that socialized man…govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational

way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind

power.”366

365
Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm
366
Marx, Capital Vol. III, pp. 958-959.
 115

Chapter VIII: Conclusion

Typically, when we hear the term communism or socialism (used interchangeably) it is

something easily dismissed. Many of us recollect our high school history class and can

regurgitate the horrors of Stalinism, Maoism, Siberian gulags, Cultural Revolutions, and Five-

Year Plans. However, if one wanted to capture not just the spirit but the content of the entire

discussion throughout this thesis in only a pair of words, those words would be philosophical

communism.

As Marx made clear in the Manuscripts, philosophical communism is in the end

“naturalism-humanism,” an idea which he articulates in his critique of Hegel as neither idealism

nor materialism, but the truth of both.367 In short, it represents for us the negation of the negation

and the overcoming of all the old Enlightenment dualisms not just in the movement of thought

(as in Hegel) but in the embedded movement of life, in the movement of human lived experience

and dialectical social relations. It must be noted that this is not an end of history trope, in which

all loose ends are finally tied and there is indeed nothing truly new under the sun, but is in many

respects the exact opposite, it is the end of human pre-history and the negative movement into a

new humanist history.

This language may lead one into drawing either a philosophical connection with, or an

advocacy for, a Kantian-esque “kingdom of ends.” This, however, is incorrect. Instead, it is

much more negative than that, more akin to what Hegel refers to as a “highway of despair,” as

“this pathway always has a negative significance for it, and what is actually the realization of the

concept means for it rather the ruin and overthrow of itself, for on this road it loses its own

truth.”368 The point of the disparaging language of the negative should not scare us but in fact

367
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 115.
368
Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 49.
 116

should be seen as our saving grace. Which is ultimately to say that despite our coming to a

conclusion of philosophical communism (naturalism-humanism), where all the old problems lose

their antithetical character, this does not ever entail that history ends its movement or that life

does not continuously need to be lived. The negative language of the dialectic is our assurance of

that.

It should therefore be clear that Marx was no utopian when it came to communism or

communist subjectivity, and it likewise needs to be seen that nothing we have said in our

discussion here is utopian in nature.369 Throughout his life Marx took great pains to never

abstract from history or its movement, from the existential situation of today to the coming-to-be

potentiality of tomorrow. As such he was very careful in his pronouncements of what any kind of

communism would “look like” in the future for the express purposes of distancing himself from

his utopian counterparts. Thus we should, in these concluding remarks, think of the communism

or the subjectivity of the “new humanism,” (described above as the moving triadic relation of U-

P-I) as a category based on necessary contingency. This looks at first like an utter contradiction

in terms, and that is the point. For the truth of the matter lies in the relation and the tension. It is

necessary because it exists independently of any one subjectivity and/or regardless of what any

one subject thinks of the matter (an ideal-real). But it is likewise contingent because it

nevertheless exists within the social relations, inside the community and relationally within the

space, movement, and activity. Just like capital as a necessary yet contingent category-subject of

bourgeois society which structures the social horizon yet at the same time is enacted by it and

ultimately passes away.

369
See Engels’s famous criticism of utopian socialism in his work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
 117

The unity in difference, and thus communism, is a realm of unalienated mutual recognition.

Wherein the back and forth dynamic is left unimpeded in itself and in its other, where it accepts

no pre-given structures, and is only allowed its own dialectical unfolding. This is what Marx

means by human history finally coming to be. But it certainly does not imply the end. As

Dunayevskaya reminds us, the resolution of the new humanism must constantly “hear itself

speak.”370 In other words it must constantly live. This, following Hegel, who demanded of us that

we should “consider things in and for themselves, that is, should consider them partly in their

universality, but also that it should not stray away from catching them at circumstances,

examples, and comparisons.”371 The point to be made is, in the final analysis, as Guevara

describes:

Socialism is young and has its mistakes. We revolutionaries often lack the knowledge and intellectual
audacity needed to meet the task of developing the new man and woman with methods different from the
conventional ones; conventional methods suffer from the influences of the society that created them. …We
socialists are freer because we are more fulfilled; we are more fulfilled because we are freer…The skeleton
of our complete freedom is already formed. The flesh and the clothing are lacking; we will create them. 372

370
Dunayevskaya, “Hegel’s Absolute as New Beginning,” p. 181.
371
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 830.
372
Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-
socialism.htm.
 118

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