Abstract
Marxism is the philosophy behind communism. Marxism is speculative, communism practical. This is not to say that Marxism is not concerned with “praxis”; it is rather to say that it is concerned with ideas and hence when one gets involved in a discussion of Marxism, one can rise above geography, nationality and political emotions. Every communist is a Marxist, but not every Marxist is a communist. The reason is that some Marxists are simply theoreticians, some might say dreamers. One might work out a peaceful co-existence with the communists that would really be only a practical accomodation for the time being, but this would not necessarily imply a dialogue or a change in anyone’s ideas. But to work out a true “modus vivendi” with Marxism is something more radical for it implies an exchange and a change of ideas on the level of philosophy. It would be a true “aggiornamento.”
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References
G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism (trans. Peter Heath, New York:Frederick A. Praeger, 1958), p. 72. Also A. James Gregor, A Survey of Marxism (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 119-120.
G. A. Wetter, Soviet Ideology Today (New York:Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), pp. 15–29.
N. Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx’s Attitude toward Religion” in The Review of Politics, University of Notre Dame, vol. 26, No. 3 (July 1964), pp. 319–352.
Roger Garaudy, “Vom Bannfluch zum Dialog” a chapter in Der Dialog (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966), pp. 68–119. Also Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (edited by T. B. Bottomore). These appear in Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man (New York:Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1961). All later references to the early manuscripts of Karl Marx will refer to this edition. On this point see especially “Alienated Labor” pp. 93-107.
Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, pp. 102–103:“While, therefore, alienated labor takes away the object of production from man, it also takes away his species-life, his real objectivity as a species-being, and changes his advantage over animals into a disadvantage insofar as his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.” Also cf. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (vol. XIV of the collected works of Lenin) (Moscow, 1952), p. 249 et seq.
Adam Schaff, A Philosophy of Man (New York: Monthly Review Press), pp. 34–35. Also G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, pp. 405-475. And in this connection let us remember that Professor Schaff is a Marxist!
Yevtushenko, Selected Poems (translated by Peter Levi, S. J. and Robin Milner-Gulland, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). All of the quotes of Yevtushenko used here are taken from this volume.
Branco Bosnjak, “Zum Sinn des Unglaubens” a chapter in Marxistisches und Christliches Weltverständnis (Herausgegeben von der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Weltgespräch) (Wien: Herder, 1966), pp. 44–45.
Yevtushenko, Selected Poems, p. 60.
I. M. Bochenski, Soviet Russian Dialectical Materialism (Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1963), pp. 57–83; 99-106. G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, pp. 73-100; 280-355. Alsoo see Grundlagen der Marxistischen Philosophie (Berlin:Dietz Verlag, 1960), pp. 123-360.
H. Falk, “Geist aus Materie” in Aktuelle Ostprobleme (Herausgegeben von Akademie-Direktor Dr. Paul Hadrossek. Als Manuskript gedrückt bei Pallottinerdruck, Limburg/Lahn:1966), p. 16:“Von Moskau zurechtgewiesen, griff er zu der verzweifelten Ausflucht, das Bewusstsein sei weder materiell noch immateriell. Auch alle anderen uns bekannten Vertreter des Diamat halten sich seit dieser Zeit an die These der offiziellen Moskauer Lehrbücher, das menschliche Bewusstsein sei immateriell.”
G. A. Wetter, Soviet Ideology Today, pp. 40–51. Bochenski, Diamat, p. 111 and 161.
R. Garaudy, From Anathema to Dialogue (New York:Herder and Herder, 1966), pp. 74–75.
Cf. G. W. Hegel, Science of Logic (Johnston-Struthers, I, 42–47; II, 39-43; 66-69; 227-229; 467-476.) Here the student of philosophy may obtain a more precise analysis.
G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. 158 et seq. Bochenski, Soviet Russian Dialectical Materialism, pp. 74-82. Grundlagen der Marxistischen Philosophie, pp. 123-159.
Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, p. 138:“You must keep in mind the ‘circular movement’ which is perceptible in that progression, according to which man, in the act of generation reproduces himself; thus man always remains the subject. But you will reply:I grant you this circular movement, but you must in turn concede the progression which leads even further to the point where I ask:who created the first man and nature as a whole? I can only reply:your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrive at that question. Ask yourself whether your question does not arise from a point of view to which I cannot reply because it is a perverted one. Ask yourself whether that progression exists as such for rational thought. If you ask a question about the creation of nature and man, you abstract from nature and man. You suppose them non-existent and you want me to demonstrate that they exist. I reply:give up your abstraction and at the same time you abandon your question.”
Ignatius Lepp, Der Lebensstil des Intellektuellen (Würzburg: Arena Verlag Georg Popp, 1966), p. 173 et seq.
Cf. G. A. Wetter, Dial. Mat., p. 406 et seq. where the author offers us more detailed examples from science.
Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, pp. 93–118; and p. 125:“This communism which negates the personality of man in every sphere is only the logical expression of private property which is this negation.” An attack on Proudhon’s crude communism.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, (trans, by J. B. Baille 2nd edition, London:George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1949), pp. 250–251.
Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, p. 138:“A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master, where he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by another person’s favor when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life but also its creation. The idea of creation is thus one that is difficult to eliminate from popular consciousness. This consciousness is unable to conceive that man and nature exist on their own account, because such an existence contradicts all the tangible facts of practical life.”
Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, p. 107.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy, p. 185.
Ibid., p. 182:“The fact that man is an embodied, living, real, sentient, objective being with natural powers, means that he has real, sensuous objects as the objects of his being or that he can only express his being in real sensuous objects.” And again we read on p. 183:“But man is not merely a natural being; he is a human natural being. He is a being for himself, and therefore a species-being; and as such he has to express and authenticate himself in being as well as in thought.”
Ibid., p. 184:“Thus, for example, after superseding religion, when he has recognized religion as a product of self-alienation, he then finds a confirmation of himself in religion as religion. This is the root of Hegel’s false positivism or of his merely apparent criticism; what Feuerbach calls the positing, negation and re-establishment of religion or theology, but which has to be conceived in a more general way. Thus reason is at home in unreason as such. Man, who has recognized that he leads an alienated life in law, politics, etc., leads his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation in contradiction with itself, and with the knowledge and nature of the object, is thus the true knowledge and life. There can no longer be any question about Hegel’s compromise with religion, the state, etc., for this lie is the lie of the whole argument.”
Ibid., p. 182:“The fact that man is an embodied, living, real, sentient, objective his being, or that he can only express his being in real, sensuous objects.”
Ibid., p. 183:“…authenticate himself in being as well as in thought.”
Ibid., p. 177.
Ibid., p. 183.
Ibid., p. 185.
Ibid., p. 187.
Ibid., p. 192.
Adam Schaff, The Philosophy of Man, pp. 122–123:“Creative discussion and working out of ideas was to some extent frowned on in our country of recent years. That was certainly wrong; and there would not have been such energetic ideological discussions among us later on, if they had not been of social significance.” Also p. 28:“It is in this light that one may understand the ignorant attempts, made with such boastfulness and aplomb by our revisionists, to counterpose the young Marx not only to Engels but also to the older Marx. For such enthusiasts, Marx was finished somewhere around 1846.”
Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, p. 98:“His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor.” This statement refers to an abuse. And again on page 99:“We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions — eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornment — while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal.” Here again Marx is attacking the unfreedom and depersonalization of man.
On this point see Professor Sydney Hook’s book entitled Paradoxes of Freedom (New York, 1961).
Cf. Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, p. 101:“To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must remain in a continuous interchange in order not to die. The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.” Notice here a foreshadowing of Professor McLuhan’s ideas:“nature is his body.” Cf. also Professor Adam Schaff, The Philosophy of Man, p. 112:“When we speak of the freedom of the individual we are speaking of the rights of the individual in society — for there is no individual outside of society. The moment this truth is recognized any illusions about absolute freedom are dispersed, and the problem opens up of determining the permissible limits of restriction of freedom, and of fixing the demarcation line between the condition we are ready to accept as one of freedom and that to which we must deny this splendid quality.”
See Adam Schaff, A Philosophy of Man, p. 11 et seq.
Karl Marx, German Ideology, p. 74:“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions, only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, p. 100:“Man is a species-being not only in the sense that he makes the community (his own as well as other things) his object both practically and theoretically, but also (and this is simply another expression for the same thing) in the sense that he treats himself as the present, living species, as a universal, and consequently free being.”
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, Introduction, p. 39:“(Since) the rational has necessary existence, as being the reality and substance of things, we are free in recognizing it as law and following it as the substance of our own being.”
F. Engels, Anti-During, Part I, ch. xi, p. 128:“Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity.”
Karl Marx, Alienated Labor, p. 100.
Adam Schaff, A Philosophy of Man, p. 112.
Mortimer J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom, (New York:Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1958), p. 383:“With regard to the negative point that freedom requires the emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, Maritain holds views which resemble those of Marx and Engels, and yet his theory of freedom is opposed to theirs. He explicitly rejects the notion that historical developments will bring forth the day when men are completely liberated from servitude.”
Adam Schaff, A Philosophy of Man, p. 64.
Vatican Council II, p. 211. (Abbott edition).
Adam Schaff, A Philosophy of Man, pp. 73–75.
G. A. Wetter, Soviet Ideology Today, p. 36:“The main topics of concern here are:the conservation laws of mass and energy; refutation of the theory of the ‘heat-death’; and the possibility of interpreting the ‘red-shift’ in such a way as to avoid the assumption of an expanding universe and hence of postulating a temporal beginning for the expansion itself … As to this whole controversy about the ‘heat-death,’ the fundamental point is that the law of entropy really offers no basis for any conclusive proof of the existence of God. Unlike the first law of thermodynamics, the second is merely statistical in character and does not wholly exclude its opposite, namely the occurrence of the state of diminished entropy (as happened at the outset of our present epoch); it merely makes this exceedingly improbable. Given a universe existing from all eternity and abandoned to the chance gyrations of its atoms, it would go on for an enormously, unimaginably (but not infinitely) long time, before eventually happening to attain to such a state; for the mathematical possibility of this is not absolutely nil. If the law of entropy can thus provide no evidence in favor of an act of creation, still less can it be cited against such a possibility. The question of God’s existence cannot be settled, one way or the other, by arguments drawn from physics. The decision rests on philosophical grounds.” I tend to agree with what Professor Wetter says here but we must remember how much emphasis the Marxists have tended to give to the law of entropy in proving the eternity of the world. The point still remains, if this is true why has it not already run down. Cf. G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p. 430:“The laws of the conservation of mass and energy which have been combined by means of the principle of the inertia of energy (E = mc2) into a common law of conservation, have been regarded, ever since Engels’ day, as a proof of the eternity of the world. Engels saw in the law of conservation of energy a proof of the fact that the universe is both indestructible and incapable of being created, and hence must have existed from all eternity (F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 93-94). Lenin likewise saw in this law “the establishment of the basic principles of materialism,’ (ME, p. 318.)” Cf. V. A. Ambarzumyan, Problema vozniknoveniya zvezd v svete novykh rabot sovetskikh astrofizikov (The Problem of the Origin of the Stars in the Light of Recent Work by Soviet Astro physicists), in Vestnik Akademii Nauk USSR, 1953 (12), pp. 49–60. On the current status of the discussion concerning the “heat-death” problem, cf. Johannes Boor, “Das Problem der Entropie des Weltalls und der Dialeketische Marxismus” in Ost-Europa Naturwissenschaft, vol. III, No. 2, pp. 105-117.
Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, pp. 138–139:Here Marx tries to avoid the question of causality by asserting that it deals with the abstract order. As a matter of fact for St. Thomas and present day Neo-Thomists it does just the opposite. The second proof of St. Thomas for the existence of God depends on efficient causality as causing a thing to come to be in the order of existence.
For developments in ethical theory and reference to Kolakowski, cf. George L. Kline, “Theoretische Ethik im Russischen Frühmarxismus” in Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, Band 9, (Berlin-Wiesbaden, 1963), pp. 270–279.
Branco Bošnjak, Marxistisches und Christliches Weltverständnis, p. 62; also p. 58, where Marx is said not to be discussing theology but religion as something illusory.
Ignatius Lepp, Atheism in our Time (trans. by B. Murchland, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1966), pp. 96 ff.
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Adelmann, F.J. (1968). Marxism. In: From Dialogue to Epilogue Marxism and Catholicism Tomorrow. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9108-1_2
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