The Material Imagination as Self-Positing Praxis 1

Science, Ideology & Revolutionary Consciousness




Preface

Philosophy attempts to rationalize that which one knows by instinct and temperament



Since my first confrontation with Marxism—while still unable to buy beer—I was drawn into its orbit by
its two most important qualities; the first was its apparent ability to reasonably explain a vast complex
of lived realities as the product of a specific historical development, and the second was that it
simultaneously seemed to clear the ground for changing those very conditions as an act of
revolutionary will. Of course this was an instinctive attraction but it has persisted until today. As I
deepened my engagement on the bumpy road of militant political activity and Marxist theory itself, I
began to oscillate between an analysis of those conditions and the search for an effective activity
necessary to change those conditions. Little by little I began to feel trapped between elaborating the
cause of my being and simultaneously asserting the freedom from the causes in my own activity and
that of the working class. Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach addresses this exact difficulty, but only
asserts a solution in a highly enigmatic form. Marx does not clearly articulate a solution. How an
organization resolves this problem is fundamental and will literally define an organization and
position it in its relation to revolutionary practice be they vanguardists, spontaneitist or reformist
hybrids. However, to discover in an organization a clearly articulated position relating historical
determination to revolutionary freedom is damn nearly impossible due to the appallingly slippery use
of such words as ideology, science, method, dialectics, materialism, idealism, theory, consciousness,
concrete, abstract, subject, object, etc. as though they were self-evident; not one of them is self-
evident. It is a theoretical hornet’s nest. What follows is neither an exegesis nor an academic
contribution to the question, but rather a speculative and somewhat idiosyncratic positing of a
solution for the difficulty in which I find myself. Before plunging into the theoretical, I want to make
clear my practical purpose—all the stuff that happens between the first coffee and lights out. My instinct and
temperament naturally pulls me towards activity; given the choice between the library shelf and filling
wine bottles with kerosene, I would choose the bottles every time. Not only do I want to make
intelligent and relevant choices between the time in the library or basement but also have a clear idea

























































1 Praxis: “Praxis is the exposure of the mystery of man as an onto-formative being, as a being that forms the (socio-human)
reality and therefore also grasps and interprets it (i.e. reality both human and extra –human, reality in its totality) Man’s praxis
is not practical activity as opposed to theorizing; it is the determination of human beings in the process of forming reality.”
K. Kosik, The Dialectic of the Concrete.
of the purpose of the activity. If I am utilizing Marxist theory, to understand some aspect of social
development for example, I want to know why this is important and how it will clear the ground for
revolutionary activity. This is all too often simply ignored, even among—perhaps especially
among—the theoretically sophisticated; one delves deeper and deeper and still deeper into these
seemingly important questions, even if the significance of the question appears to reside entirely
within the theory itself. I for one have little interest in producing an analysis of any kind if its primary
purpose is not to release a revolutionary will, my own and that of humanity. I look around. Since the
days of my first confrontation with Marx I see that lived realities have deteriorated far beyond what I
could have imagined, yet the voice of revolutionary Marxism still sounds like a thundering whimper
on the battlefield. This is certainly not what I had counted on. How can we explain this? Of course
we need to look at the actual evolution of the objective historical developments to account for this—
this we do with gusto—but we also need to ask something else. Is it enough that we “unveil” the laws
of capitalist development for all to see? Is the unveiling itself adequate to count as revolutionary
praxis? Hidden beneath the structure of an organization’s activity is an implicit philosophy that guides
its work. If elaborating the laws of capitalist development is understood as an unveiling, as
demystification from the falsehood of bourgeois ideology, as an investigation into the truth of
phenomena, then we take a position towards our object that is nearly identical to that of the scientist
towards his Petri dish. In essence, in spite of endless assertions to the contrary, this is still the work
of Kautsky and Lenin’s bourgeois “revolutionary” intellectuals. What is missing is the active, the
sensual and the subjective side of practice; unless of course we believe that theoretical analysis itself is the
active side of revolutionary praxis suggested by Marx in his First Thesis on Feuerbach.2 I am not
convinced. Nor am I suggesting that we begin to fill up wine bottles or pass out leaflets at each
factory closing to find the active side, this too can be the activity of the bourgeois intellectual towards
his object. Rather, I believe that we must position ourselves in a very different manner in all of our
activities whether analytic, artistic or kinetic; a radical re-positioning that distinguishes our activity
from the manner in which the bourgeois approaches his object. The essence of this re-positioning is
to emboss, in all activity, in all analysis, the self-positing nature of revolutionary volition, the onto-
formative practice, that is, the practical, the sensual and the subjective. Marxism is not merely a critique of
existing ideologies, though it is this; neither is it merely an historical method, though it has its
method; nor is it an experimental science, though it certainly has elements that resemble scientific
activity; what will distinguish a revolutionary Marxism is its ability to animate the subjective, the sensual,
and the practical side of man, more specifically, his imagination.

Where should I begin?

Begin at the beginning; it is always good to begin at the beginning.

























































2 Marx: First Thesis on Feuerbach “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that
the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity,
practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism –
which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.”


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But where is the beginning?
Here! The beginning is always here.

An Identity Crisis


Since its inception, Marxists, as well as Marx and Engels themselves, sought an identity with science,
partly for historical reasons, partly for theoretical reason and partly for legitimacy reasons. The use of
the phrase Scientific Socialism was an attempt to distinguish a theory that was the result of rigorous
objective analysis rather than fanciful utopian dreams. The cache of the word science since the
Enlightenment is indisputable insofar as it is believed that only in science can we uncover objective
truth, and if Marxism were a science then it could be claimed that proletarian revolution is an
inevitable effect from an identifiable cause. Classical scientific theory claims that through a scientific
analysis of the phenomena of nature as it presents itself to our senses—observation or
experimentation—we are able to determine an objective truth that is real and quite independent of
human caprice or will. Some Marxists would claim the same for Marxism in the field of social activity.
Through an analysis of the social phenomena that presents itself to us in history, political formation,
economic activity etc, we can identify the objective determinants that can explain the phenomena
without mystification, illusion and without the caprice of human will, indeed the will itself in this
conception is subject to objective analysis through magic of historical materialism, evolutionary
psychology, genetics and other medical practices. This is no small claim, and it is this claim, explicit
and implicit that I would like to refute. Moreover, I would like to formulate a conceptualization of
Marxism that is not reduced to complete voluntarism or its apparent antipode mechanistic causality
that characterizes the main streams of the natural sciences as are they are normally practiced.3

The Nature of Scientific Activity and Marxism



One observation is worth noting from the outset in relation to the status of Marxism as a science.
Such claims of scientific legitimacy are virtually ignored by the scientific community at large. There
are two ways that one might explain this indifference: 1) science itself is driven by bourgeois interest
and entirely subsumed into the net of bourgeois ideology, thus it is in the objective interest of the
bourgeois scientific community to ignore or to remain hostile to the claim, or 2) there is little about
the Marxist approach to social analysis that resembles the actual form of scientific criteria for truth.
Furthermore, one might add that the scientific community is nearly immune to socio-philosophical
critiques of its own work. In the first case there is little doubt that bourgeois interests are steering the
direction of scientific research and application, and one could add that certain theories rise to


























































3I use the term science in the sense that has entered common understanding fully aware of the considerable difficulties that
arise when one attempts such board generalizations. I will bracket the question of the “real” nature of science, which is
important but not at the moment central to my argument.


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prominence as scientific homologues to particular stages in the development of capitalism but one
would have great difficulty in making the assertion that the relatively modest truth claims of the
natural sciences are ideologically determined by bourgeois interests. One might argue, for instance,
that the second law of thermodynamics is a product of a particular stage of capitalist development
and has a strong ideological character, but the second law has not been proved for all systems or
disproved experimentally, thus it remains an organizational principle not a universal truth claim. If
we take an example of the cold-fusion claim in 1989 by two electro-chemists from the Universities of
Utah and Southampton, we see clearly the self-correcting mechanism that science has that social
theory does not. The experiment was published with great excitement and within weeks the results
of the chemists’ claims were rejected on the basis of verifiable experimentation. The scientific
community did not break into factions over the “belief” in cold-fusion. It was universally rejected as
a flawed claim on the basis of experimental testing. Scientific knowledge has a self-correcting
mechanism that is worth understanding. I would argue that in science it is possible to distinguish the
objective truth claims that are relatively protected from ideological distortion from organizational
principles in science that are potentially distorted but are held in suspension as truth claims by serious
scientists themselves. Marxism cannot make this claim. Therefore, I would opt for the second
explanation for the indifference of scientists towards Marxism. Marxism as a “science” has little in
common with the model of science as handed down to us from Newtonian principles. I hope to
demonstrate that this is not a weakness of Marxism but rather its precise strength in relation to the
classical scientific stance towards objective truth.

The Objects of Knowledge: Natural Sciences and Marxism



The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple.
Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it,
whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms,
there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is easier of
study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscope
nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.
Marx, Capital 1: 7-8 (My emphasis.)

Marx begins Capital with a description of the value-form of objects as they appear to us as
commodities: the basic unit of capital formation. Commodity objects in a capitalist universe have a
dual nature as simultaneously a use-value and an exchange-value. The use-value is the objects’ eternal
form, which has no existence apart from its physical properties,4 and the exchange-value its contingent5 form


























































4 Capital v.1.1
5 I use the word contingent as opposed to its necessary form, not to mean accidental, but rather subject to forces of a
temporary nature that lay external to the form itself.


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under the conditions of capitalism where all sensuous characteristics are extinguished.6 So what is the object
of Marx’s investigation: a pair of shoes, a bushel of wheat or a yard of cloth? In fact, the object is
none of these as objects in themselves but only as they appear in thought as commodities or
labor/object in their value form. What appears objective are the social relations constituted by the
commodity form but the objectivity itself is constituted/appears via analysis from a series of
definitions or immanent categories. Marx makes it clear that the commodity is not a thing but rather
social relationships that appear to be relationships expressed as things. Therefore, to hold a yard of
cloth is not to hold a commodity, even fresh from the factory it remains a yard of cloth; one cannot
hold a social relationship. Without the implied social relationship in which the yard of cloth exists,
there is no commodity, nor any object called a commodity. Before we get bogged down in Hegelian
categories of logic, let’s stop for a moment to remember that this is only the beginning of the analysis
and is itself very elementary and simple. From this simple beginning Marx builds an extraordinarily
complex analysis of the movement of capital—both real and immanent—as it is expressed in social
relations. We should reflect on the nature of the substitution of the force of abstraction for microscopes or
chemical reagents in his method for uncovering the real movement of human relationships.

The classical scientific goal towards the objects of its study is to uncover the laws that govern the
behavior of objects and phenomena independently of human volition. A scientist observes a flame, a
beaker of water and steam. He names them, observes them repeatedly and explains the relationships
between the three elements. Now language and a degree of abstraction are necessary for the scientist
to bring these experiences into consciousness and even higher levels of abstraction are necessary to
formulate the laws that govern the appearance of the steam. There can be conflicting explanations of
the outcome that adequately explain the phenomena like Aristotle’s elemental theory or Dalton’s
atomic theory. Both explain well the observations but in the wider context of more complex natural
phenomena the atomic theory explains it better. The challenge for the scientist is in fact to remove
himself from the phenomena in order to describe it in such a way that his presence has no effect on
the outcomes. We know, however, from modern quantum theory that in the final analysis this is not
possible, the observer is always part of the observed and influences the outcome of the observation
even if it is imperceptible. However, this is itself an observable phenomenon and can be accounted
for in the development of a theory that explains the phenomena as law-like; what is important here is
that it is NOT the explanation that has the effect on the observed phenomena.7 The flame, the
beaker of water and the steam will not care if the observer is an Aristotelian or an Atomist. That is to
say that the object/phenomena is not dependent on the conscious intentions of the observer. Water
will boil and produce steam equally for both of them.

























































6 Capital v.1.1 And further: “the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of
labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the
material relations arising there from. There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the
fantastic form of a relation between things. ... This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities. (1867)
7 See Gavin Kitching’s Marxism and Science for a more complete discussion


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How does this differ from Marx’s “force of abstraction” in the development of his analysis of the value-
form of production? In this Introduction to his Critique of Political Economy, Marx explicitly states that his
method is to start from the abstract and ascend to the concrete, even if the concrete is the real
starting point. But this still leaves us asking what is the object of his analysis? We could argue that the
object of Marx’s analysis is everything real, the concrete whole, but obviously this would force us to
make a leap of faith that the object of analysis is actual and real. The concrete whole is a conceptual
category, an idealization, not an object/phenomenon. Science is more restrictive than this. First and
foremost the object of analysis is the value-form as a social relation, that is, mans’ real reproductive
activity under the conditions of capitalism. But mans’ real activity is that of social man capable of
acting consciously and reflecting on both his activity and his own consciousness which in turn creates
new conditions of his further activity and conscious development, that is to say, the object of analysis
is mans’ own self-positing conscious activity.8 If we return to the concept of the commodity in
Marx’s simple analysis we can see that the commodity as a social relationship is immediately bound to
mans’ conscious intention. That is to say, an object only becomes a commodity under specific
conditions of mans’ conscious intention to buy and sell under the general conditions of capitalist
domination. Where does this leave us? It appears that the object of Marx’s analysis is entirely
dependent on his own discursive abstract logical category. The commodity only exists as an object of
analysis abstractly and a change in the form of the abstraction entirely alters not only the form of the
object but also the very existence of the object itself. The water will not boil in this case! The
problem of course is not only that Marxist theory is an analysis of discursive structures but is also
itself a part of the self-conscious intentional in contemporary social relationships. Unlike science,
which believes itself to hold a position of dispassionate objectivity, Marxism is an intention analyzing
an ensemble of intentions within which it finds itself. 9 Its claim to objectivity in its search for the laws
of historical movement is a bit like the man who wants to stand on his own shoulders to get a better
view of himself. To summarize this point, the objects/phenomena in a scientific study of nature, may
be, or rather must be expressed in discursive structures in order to analyze them, but are in
themselves not discursive and not affected by those discursive structures. Marxism, on the other
hand, is the theory from which the objects/phenomena themselves emerge from the discursive
structures (symbolic logic) of both the analyst, and the social agents subject to analysis, that are


























































8 The most eloquent expression that captures the self-positing of man is Marx’s own description in Capital: “A spider
conducts operations, which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the
construction of his honeycomb cells. But, what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is that the
architect builds the cell in his mind before he builds it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had
already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form
in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials, and this is a purpose he is conscious of, it
determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.” Capital v1 3:7
9
A better formulation made by Richard Gunn, “Whereas general theory stand back from its object and reflects upon it,
Marxist theory situates itself within its object (practical reflexivity) and considers itself constituted through its object
(determinant abstraction)” p 32 and further “…if one likes, one can say that Marxism has the moment of contradiction as
its object.” P 33 “Against Historical Materialism” Open Marxism Vol II (Pluto 1992)


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deeply and specifically bound with its own intention as a self-reflexive praxis. I would argue that this
alone disqualifies Marxism as a science comparable to the form of natural science.10

Back to the Steam: Praxis and Mediation

Heat is added to water and steam emerges. Through continued activity and experimentation it is
discovered that steam itself can be converted from heat energy into mechanical energy to make
wheels turn and from mere mechanical energy can be converted into a commodity. It is specifically
steam in its commodity form that is the driving force to the continued discoveries of the properties
of heat and the development of the laws of thermodynamics. In practice, the commodity form is
inseparable from the higher levels of knowledge of steam heat. Yet, the commodity form of the
scientific practice is the form that is bound to and dependent upon specific discursive social
structures. This is steam’s contingent form as opposed to its necessary form. The necessary form of the
steam is also bound to social practice but a social practice that expresses itself as a series of procedures
that are inextricably bound to the law-like character of nature and not the discursive practices of
social formation. The commodity form of steam can be abandoned or superseded but this will have
no affect on the necessary social procedures required to assist nature in creating steam. Historically
speaking, contingency is the ground from which necessity is discovered, in other words, in human
praxis contingency is the midwife of all necessity.11

But, both forms of social praxis-contingent and necessary- are still tied to discursive structures, that is to
say, conscious intentions made possible by language. The commodity form of steam and the natural
form of steam both require conscious social intervention that in essence mediates both the particular
consciousness of the form and mediates the existence of the form12. One would be tempted to
conclude from this division that one form of mediation is true (necessity) and the other is false
(contingent). Lukacs makes this sort of division in his History and Class Consciousness when he argues
that an imputed consciousness is what is rational but unavailable due to the distorting presence of
bourgeois ideology that renders the contingent as somehow false. In this case the imputed would be
the equivalent to the necessary form of praxis. But the question emerges immediately, what is the
object/phenomenon under analysis that must follow a necessary law-like procedure, and where does

























































10 Marxism is distinctly NOT a science of the OBJECT nor is it strictly speaking a METHOD OF CRITIQUE on the
model of 18th C. critiques in which the purpose was to remove the false of an argument leaving behind only the truth.
11
There are some similarities here with Althusser’s Philosophy of the Encounter and his concept of aeleatory materialism.
However, Althusser’s entire project is to eliminate all vestiges of historicism and its accompanying idealism, which, while
important, can be taken too far. Althusser asserts that the dominant conceptualization of historical movement is that the
whole pre-exists the parts and has within it an essential logic (teleological), i.e. the bourgeoisie emerges within the shell of
Feudalism as the harbingers of capitalism’s future. But in aleatory materialism it is the chance encounter of the parts that
create the whole, there is no necessity that pre-exists the encounter. (Aleatory: law that depends on a contingent event). For
Althusser the contingent is the only reality and results from uncaused events “swerves.” It appears that he does not
acknowledge labor as procedural necessity that mediates nature. Once posited, necessity emerges and takes on a real presence,
though its origins may well have been contingent.

12 Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Book Intellectual and Manual Labor, A Critique of Epistemology 1951 is an important contribution to
understanding how the value-form of production is reproduced in the on the epistemological grid so to speak.


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one find the imputed conditions that are necessary for the objective statement of the real? In truth the
imputed does not exist outside of theoretical abstractions, that is to say, outside of intentions. What is
given to us is perhaps the fact that barricades were not constructed by specific people in a given place
and time. But only one with a specific intention could pose this observation in the first place;
moreover the explanation has no necessary procedural logic. The lack of barricades can be adequately
accounted for by any number of explanations and there would be no self-correcting mechanism
within the theory to verify which is the most adequate explanation.

This seeming impasse where Marxism is unable to make a law-like statement of social activity in
anyway that resembles objectivity and necessity in natural science should only distress us if we stop
our critique here. Marxism’s primary characteristic is to analyze and intervene in the socially
contingent, not in the socially necessary procedures of mediation between man and nature. It must
account for or theoretically posit necessity but has little to say about its actuality.13

Consciousness and Language: Cause  Effect



If, as I believe, that the socially necessary cannot exist nor is it ever brought into being outside of the
socially contingent, it follows that both are equally real. One is not more real than the other. Notions
of real and false, or illusory or truthful are misleading holdovers from Platonic Hegelian modes of
thought. I believe it would be better to designate two forms of mediation: first order mediations are
those forms of praxis that must conform to the law-like procedure that are within the
object/phenomena and that have a trans-historical quality that would exist independently of the
social system that gave rise to it, and second order mediations are forms of praxis that exist within
the realm of intention and contingency, subject to external causality and are dependent on discursive
structures of consciousness always subject to multiple bifurcations14. In real historical practice they
are not necessarily two different activities but rather more often two distinct sides of the same
activity. Under the conditions of capitalism the fault line between the two orders of mediation might
be conceived as the split between abstract labor (second order) and concrete labor (first order). This is a
direct confrontation with Marx’s unfortunate formulation of base and superstructure,15 which, if


























































13
Moishe Postone in his Time, Labor and Social Domination (2003), correctly, I believe, asserts that Marx’s immanent critique
uses categories that are applicable only the conditions of capitalist domination.
14
Sohn-Rethel’s concept of first nature and second nature roughly corresponds to the first and second order mediations as used
here.

15 Following is Marx’s mistakenly formulated synthesis of historical materialism. It would be worth the effort to
demonstrate that this is more of a metaphorical expression rather than a fully considered outline of his concept. There is no
question that Marx does not adhere to this mechanistic formulation throughout his works, in fact the language of
mechanistic causality rarely appears as he unfolds the logic of Capital in the Grundrissa or Capital: “In the social production
of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that


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accepted uncritically, invariably leaves us to formulate a mechanistic, teleological causality that moves
predictably in a temporal sequence. In the final analysis this “metaphorical” formulation renders the
active side of consciousness as the fixed consequence of an unconscious cause. Inactivity. This would
make the very agents of capital and thus the revolution unconscious actors in a mechanistic drama.

Now, if we remain for the moment in the realm of the socially contingent or of the second order
mediation, we remain within the realm of practical conscious intention, the realm of meaning as
structured by language. Marx emphasizes,

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men
as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the
need, the necessity of intercourse with other men [my relations to my surroundings is my
consciousness.] The German Ideology part I (original emphasis)16

Among the great theoretical insights of Hegel, and in particular of Marx, is to insist that
consciousness [via language] was inextricably bound to historical self-production in mans’ interaction
with other men and his surroundings. But perhaps an even greater insight was the recognition that all
theoretical/practical consciousness, including his own, must be subject to the same conditions and
thus reflexively the same critique. But, here a higher level of the problem is emphasized for those
who hope to equate this Marxist insight to classical scientific theoretical methodology. From what
theoretical positions can one stand that will posit necessity and objective certainty if the positing itself
is subject to the same causal necessity? If one hopes to find the similar laws of causality as found in
natural science where the necessary procedure is ultimately independent of the particular form of the
positing, he will have to find a position outside the loop of the causal chain. I don’t believe it will ever
be found.17 This type of causality does not work at the level of second order mediations. In the realm of
social contingency and second order mediation there is certainly causality but it is a causality of a
different kind.

Causality itself is not a thing or a phenomenon, nor is it to be found in phenomena. Recognizing this,
Kant classified causality as among the a priori categories of thought that is both a universal and a
necessary category in order to understand phenomena as presented to experience. It is in essence an
ordering of the necessary temporal sequencing of events in such a way that the appearance of one
event is dependent on the previous appearance of another event. It enables us to posit laws in nature.


























































determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy 1859.
16 Also: “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual
world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so
they were bound to make language into an independent realm.” German Ideology c 3
17 Ernst Mach correctly pointed out that the world is given to us only once-- which sets limits on the truth claim of science. For

the classical science endeavor to be successful two conditions are generally required 1) reproducibility of the original
conditions and 2) isolation from external influences in a “closed system.” Neither of these conditions is available for social
analysis.


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But the temporal sequencing of events can appear to consciousness in curious ways. Most of us have
had the experience while dreaming of an external undreamed stimulation that enters the dream; say
the sound of slamming door. The dream remarkably accounts for the sound and places it
retroactively in a sequence, not as the cause of the event sequence, but as the outcome of the
sequence. The dreamer is driving a car and suddenly loses control, the dreamer and the car crash into
a tree and the sound of the slamming door outside of the dream provides the sound of the crash
inside the dream. What is remarkable here is that the slamming door is the real cause of the dream
sequence but to the dream consciousness it is the dream that is the cause of the crashing sound; cause
becomes effect and the causal arrow is reversed. Now granted, this hardly disproves the temporal
sequence of natural causality, but it illustrates the problematic nature of causality when it is applied to
human praxis in its self-reflexive consciousness. Freud pointed out a phenomenon, later emphasized
by Jacque Lacan, which centered on the appearance of childhood trauma. A pre-linguistic event in a
child’s experience, that is pre-conscious, may have no appearance as trauma until the development of
the super-ego retroactively imposes the character of trauma on the event. The pre-conscious
experience now becomes the trauma that is the cause of neurosis, but the appearance of the event as
trauma was retroactively imposed by the development of the super-ego altering the temporal
sequence of causality. Now, we can see how this might work in dream formation and how it might
work in the case of psychological trauma, but might there be a similar reversal in social praxis?

This brings us, of course, to Marx’s Third Thesis on Feurebach, which is indeed at the very core of the
complex problematic of Marxist theory.

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that
circumstances are changed by men and that the educator himself must be educated. This doctrine
must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of
the changing of circumstances or of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally
understood only as revolutionary practice.

The problem here is precisely the problem of causality and temporal sequencing. If material
circumstances structure human consciousness and thus human praxis, how can consciousness ever
become revolutionary and break free of its own sequential causality if it is an automatic and necessary
result of historical causes? This would be the division of society into two parts, one of which is superior to
society. This remains the mystical core of every revolutionary group that fails to confront this
foundational dilemma in its own activity. Each wavers continuously between mechanistic causality on
the model of classical natural science and its apparent antithesis in idealist voluntarism. Eventually all
“revolutionary materialists,” who base their materialism on classical rationalist models of materialism,
that is a materialism of necessity and teleology, abandon their own stated philosophy in favor of
idealism which was hidden beneath all along (even if never acknowledged) as their own positions can


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never be verified as law-like procedures in practice but they can of course always be fully verified in
the astonishingly intricate and always correct clouds of thought.18

Marx does in fact give us ample examples that enable us to formulate a method that avoids
mechanistic causality and historic teleology. Marx asserts, for example, that capital historically pre-
supposes the existence of money, but money specifically as coin and measure not money as capital.
Money itself becomes capital (capital’s proper form) only with the introduction of wage labor or
specifically with the separation of labor from the means of production. With the growing dominance
of wage labor money changes its nature as the result of the full development of capital. Capital now
becomes the pre-condition for the full development of money retroactively insofar as money—as
capital—henceforth appears as historically given in its full expression as immanent. Marx elaborates
this conception,

Every pre-condition of the social production process is at the same time its result, and every one of its
results appears simultaneously as its pre-condition. All of the production relations within which the
process moves are therefore just as much its products as they are its conditions. The more one
examines its nature as it really is, [the more one sees] that in the last form it becomes increasingly
consolidated, so that independently of the process these conditions appear to determine it, and their
own relations appear to those competing in the process as objective condition, as objective forces,
aspects of things, the more so as in the capitalist process, every element, even the simplest, the
commodity for example, is already an inversion, and causes relations between people to appear as
attributes of things and as relations of people to the social attributes of things. Marx, Theories of
Surplus Value vol. 319

To conceptually exchange result for the pre-condition of a process and vice-versa would not be possible
in natural science where one studies things and their forces independently of conscious apprehension.
These things, money for example, appear as objective forces in the capitalist process, but money is
specifically not a thing it is rather the perversion of a social relation that takes on the attribute of a
thing for consciousness. In its transformation into capital, money as a thing as coin, undergoes no
physical transformation. The change is entirely social. In fully developed capitalism money takes on
the appearance of a naturally given thing with the force of nature—its fetish form—also the cause of
social consciousness rather than its result. Elsewhere Marx writes,

The commodities are first transformed into bars in the head and in the speech before they are
exchanges for one another. They are appraised before being exchanged. And in order to exchange
them they must be brought into a given numerical relationship to one another. In order to bring them
into such numerical relations, in order to make them commensurable, they must obtain the same


























































18
Mechanistic Materialism (mechanistic causality) is a philosophy that masks a fundamental idealism in that meaning is
imputed onto things and phenomena prior to their actual existence.

19
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value vol 3. P 507-508 (Lawrence and Wishart, London 1972) cited in Bonefeld “Capital, Labor

and Primitive Accumulation. (Libcom.org)


 11

 domination (unit). (The bar has merely an imaginary existence, just as, in general, a relation can obtain
a particular embodiment and become individualized only by means of abstraction.) 20

Now, this imaginary existence takes on a real existence in the process of exchange. The transformation in
the head and in speech is the pre-condition for exchange to take place just as the act of exchange is the
precondition for the transformation of value in the head and in speech. Value itself must be formed
twice so to speak, in the head and in the speech and again in the act of exchange. What is a subjective
abstraction that appears in the imagination, takes on the force of an objective abstraction in the form of
money.21 This doubling of value is actually the transference of the value–form from the mode of
thought-consciousness to the mode of production and exchange, one that moves in both directions
synchronically. A change in one is simultaneously a change in the other provided extrinsic forces do
not disrupt the transference or the internal contradictions within the form itself do not make their
appearance. This transference of value (value itself is a differential non-substance that has no reality
outside of its effects)22 must be constantly reproduced through its modes at every moment. The failure
to make the transfer, to reproduce value socially, in thought and production/exchange, is manifest as
a crisis in capitalism.23 Reformism is precisely the reproduction of the value in its most rational form
which in effect smoothes the transference of value from the social consciousness to the act to
production and exchange. Revolutionary activity can be understood as any activity that disrupts the
transference of value from one mode to the other. The importance of this doubling of value is crucial
to understanding the transference between cause and effect in social formation and ultimately an
understanding of the possibility of revolutionary consciousness.

Classical bourgeois epistemology wavers between mechanistic materialism and idealism, which is of
course typically reproduced in traditional conceptions of Marxism. If we are to steer a path between
these isomorphic failures we need to look closely at the structure of consciousness as the locus of
Marx’s educator who must himself be educated. Here language is the key; as Marx himself acknowledged
language is practical consciousness. First and foremost we must not assume that the model of natural
science as historically practiced is the pinnacle or standard from which the human search for “truth”
and revolutionary practice is to be judged.


























































20 Marx, Grundrissa (Penguin 1993) p 142
21 For an elaboration of the concept of objective or real abstraction see Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Alberto Toscano
22 Marx writes: “One and the same capital can exist at one moment in the form of a sum of money, at another in the form
of some raw material, of an instrument or of a finished product. These things are not actually capital itself; capital dwells in
the value that they have.” (original emphasis) cited in Beckhaus “Between Philosophy and Science” Open Marxism vol. 2
23 In 2002 for every dollar of goods exchanged there were 55 dollars of financial assets in circulation. Marazzi, Capital and

Language (Semiotext(e) 2008). Eventually this imbalance of the value form over-weighted in the imaginary is unable to
realize itself in the transfer to exchange/production allowing 70 billion dollars in financial assets to vanish in a single
afternoon in 2008. The transfer from one mode to another is disrupted and a crisis makes it appearance in the breach.
Likewise, the appearance of unsold goods, unused production capacity, mass unemployment and marginalized employment
weighted on the side of production and exchange fails to make the necessary transfer of the value form to the imaginary. In
these moment of crisis capital must aggressively attempt to reestablish synchronicity through destruction of labor, un-
valorized wealth, social repression, militarization and above all ideological production structured by the value–form itself.


 12

The Unique Character of Consciousness as Structured by Language


In 1929, V.N. Volosinov made a groundbreaking contribution to the problem of consciousness and
ideology through an analysis of language in his work Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. What
Volosinov attempted to do was provide a materialist grounding for understating consciousness that
was neither an outgrowth of linguistic formalism where language was considered a self-referential
closed system or the result of psychological essentialism where language was merely the mode to
express the inner drives of instinct. In both of these general approaches what is expressly omitted
from the explanatory theory is the socially active side of language formation and use. The formalists
conceive language as an autonomous system with its own interior logic that humans simply use or
occupy but have little direct impact on the logic itself. The psychological essentialists locate the
source of language as the expression of the individual instinctive drive that uses language to express
what was always already there within each individual. The more recent forms of de-socialized
language theory oscillate between the new wave of genetic evolutionists searching for language genes
and post-modernist discourse theorists who give autonomy to discursive structures that are
themselves responsible for the formation of reality itself: “everything is discourse.” What all of these
approaches have in common is the reduction or even the expulsion of the social influence on
linguistic praxis as a dialectical self-positing in a context of historically conditioned conflict.

Volosinov makes the following assertions in his analysis:

• Signs form the primary structure consciousness in sign systems and the ideal sign for
consciousness is the word.

• Signs are material entities (sound, the written word, visual images) and as such are subject to
production, distribution and accumulation, which always take place within the context of
historically conditioned social conflict.

• The origin of signs is social and thus external to individual consciousness of which it is
constitutive, that is, individual consciousness itself has it origins outside of the individual in
the social sphere

• Signs have a dual nature: they are one with themselves as objects/sounds etc. and they
refract a reality outside of themselves in and for consciousness.

• Sign meanings are not fixed in relation to that which is signified, as signs they must always be
reproduced in consciousness in a context of conflict

• Because their dual nature, signs are characterized by an essential instability that is produced
by the socio-historical context

• Signs are a critical point of conflict in class struggle and simultaneously refract the meaning
of that self-same conflict for consciousness.


 13

The value of these assertions is precisely what will allow us to unravel the mystery of “class-
consciousness,” or rather to demystify it. There is all too often a tendency to equate “class-
consciousness,” even if not explicitly, with Hegel’s Geist (Spirit) as though class-consciousness is the
materialist inversion of the idealist Geist. But most every concept variant of class-consciousness,
collective-consciousness, imputed-consciousness etc has a distinctly idealist odor about it. It appears
to be Hegel’s objective idealism by another name. The consciousness of the proletariat, it is claimed,
is the self-consciousness of humanity coming to its concept. This formulation and many similar
formulations, have not only an idealist air but also a distinct teleology. Teleology itself is most
typically the outcome of an imputed necessity: the essence of Geist or the essence of class-
consciousness as the outcome of historical necessity. 24 The only outcome of this idealist framework
is to return to a mechanistic causality, thus, in the final analysis, the only way social necessity as
essence can be posited is to subsume social contingency into a procedural necessity as though it was
identical to the natural sciences, thus outside of intention.25 Volosinov, on the other hand, provides us
with the possibility of a materialist phenomenology of consciousness that will enable us to account
for the self-positing nature of human practice as a necessity.

To begin with, consciousness is a phenomenon that resides in the individual thought processes via
the circulation of signs, as they reconfigure the organism’s sensual experience in thought, but not
only. The important point is that class-consciousness, proletarian-consciousness, revolutionary-
consciousness, or a collective-consciousness of any kind cannot exist as a thing, and there is no
location of a presumed collective-consciousness. Collective-consciousness can only be conceived as
the communicative link in human praxis—production, distribution, accumulation, and consumption
of signs—between individuals and groups of individuals. Individual consciousness exists in the mind,
specifically through the refracted meaning of signs; whereas collective consciousness exists in the
material production of signs themselves, external to individual thought. Any attempt to give it a
metaphysical quality as super-consciousness will return us to the idealism of the Geist. 26 The basic
unit of this communicative praxis is the word, which has a material presence external to thought yet

























































24This is not to suggest that there is no room for the concept of teleology in history, but it must be a teleology that emerges
from the contingent self-positing praxis of social man. See Lukac’s Ontology.

26 Postone asserts that the proper substitution of the Hegelian Geist in Marx’s Capital is capital itself and not labor as is often
understood. The immanence of Capital is the self-valorizing imperative nature of value in motion. While this is an important
advance over “traditional” forms of Marxism, Postone subtly and not so subtly ends in removing human agency and posits
the complete autonomy of capital as an immanent historical force. He even writes: “Both the proletariat and the capitalist
class are bound to capital, but the former is more so: capital conceivably could exist without capitalists, but it could not exist
without value-creating labor.” (my emphasis) p. 357 Marx anticipate just such a formulation when he makes clear, “But
capital in its being-for-itself is the capitalist. Of course, socialists sometimes say, we need capital, but not the capitalist. Then
capital appears as a pure thing, not as a relation of production which, reflected in itself, is precisely the capitalist. I may well
separate capital from a given individual capitalist, and it can be transferred to another. But, in losing capital, he loses the
quality of being a capitalist. Thus capital is indeed separable from individual capitalist, but not from the capitalist who, as
such, confronts the worker.” (Original emphasis) Marx Grundrissa p 303. Postone’s contribution to understanding the
importance of abstract labor as intrinsic to capital is of foundational importance but in the end he comes dangerously close
to formulating Marxism as a science of the object, even if in his conception the object is the categorical abstraction of
Capital as immanent object.


 14

refracts a meaning that is always unstable in thought itself. It is worth looking at the nature of the
word for a moment. The instant that we name an object of our sensual experience—a chair that can
be seen and sat upon for instance—we destroy the sensual determinants of the chair in order to bring
it into thought. We disembody it for consciousness, that is, we relieve it of the polyvalent character of
its determinations.27 This idealization in thought via the word chair does violence and not only strips
the chair of its reality but equally allows us to see the chair in ways that are not necessarily determined
by the chair itself. 28 The concept of the chair can and must become detached from the real chair.
The point here is simply that the concept/word chair need not and cannot reflect the actual chair; not
only does it not reflect the chair, it actually reconstitutes the chair in thought incorporating unstable
determinates that now mediate all further observations of and sensual contact with the real chair.
This necessary instability that exists between consciousness, the symbolic and the real is fundamental
to understanding how the imagination can break the causal chain to becoming a self-positing subject.
Jacque Lacan distinguishes three modes (registers) of being for use in psychoanalysis that may be
valuable here if modified somewhat: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Never mind the problem
of the word Real as though the Symbolic and Imaginary are false. This is not the meaning of the Real in
Lacan’s usage. However, departing considerably from Lacan’s strict definitions, I will use the terms
in the following manner:

• the [Unnamed ] Real 29 is all human experience that is not yet, or can never be expressed
symbolically and made available directly for consciousness;

• the Symbolic is composed of the signs and systems of signs that is available to and necessarily
structures and mediates the general contours of consciousness and experience;

• the Imaginary is the reordering of those signs within consciousness in new ways, a mental
process that freely recombines the symbolic without a necessary/fixed reference to the
procedural

And here I will add a fourth term in order to complete the circle,


• the Material Imagination which designates the material reproduction of that which has been
produced in the Imaginary; the objectification in objects and procedures that were first
posited in the imagination.

With this schema 30 we will be able to account for the social nature of individual consciousness, the
material expression of this consciousness, the dialectical relationship between the individual and the


























































27 This problem is of course at the core of Western philosophy and was recognized from the Greeks from Plato onwards.
Zeno’s paradox highlights the separation between he named (ideal) and the real.
28 Marx points out the centrality of the symbolic for consciousness as the structure of experience. ‘Real thalers have the same
existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real thaler any existence except in the imagination, if only in 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.” Marx, Dissertation
29 It may be better to use Bergson’s term of the “unnamed real” in order not to set up a dichotomy between the real and
false which would be entirely misleading here.


 15

social and the self-positing character of humanity in such a way that man can become the cause of his
own cause or the educator who must be educated.31 To approach this formulation, how this schema may
help to disentangle a very complex knot, we should apply the concept immediately as a critique.

The Endless Confusion of Ideology



The concept of ideology is one of the most abused concepts in the whole corpus of marxology. In
essence, it can mean whatever one wants it to mean at any given moment and can be used to
bludgeon ones enemies at any given turn; the Gulag was full of ideological deviants! It is a useless
form of a concept unless it can be distinguished from its non-form. Without laying out the complex
history of the concept as it evolved from its positive connotation in the 18th century to the negative
one that Marx and Engels bequeathed to it, suffice it to summarize that it is typically understood as a
set of ideas that hide reality, mystifies it and distorts it for the purposes of class domination. But
what is it? As a form it can not be distinguished from Marxist theory itself, it can really only be
claimed that its mystifying properties reside exclusively in the content of its conclusions, and in the
final analysis, we must ask, how can one judge the correct content other than from the barrel of a
rifle,32 if, as we have asserted, that in its structure it has no inherent self-correcting mechanism as in
natural science?33 Volshinov helps here by asserting that ideology is above all a system of signs that
has a material form: words, images, sounds etc. It is a form of consciousness structured by signs that
emerges from social conflict as lived experience. There can be many competing systems of signs, each
attempting to explain the total ensemble of experience as it is symbolically structured and experienced
as the unnamed real.34 But in essence one ideology is as good as another if it succeeds, that is if it
adequately explains for the existing symbolic experience and accounts for the unnamed real of
experience. What any ideology must do to succeed is to formulate a symbolic generality in which all
individual cases can be accounted for and it must account for, or at least not contradict, the law-like
procedures that enable the reproduction of the species. The mechanism for the domination of one
ideology over another is manifold but must first account for the material production and circulation

























































30
Schiller once wrote: all that a man can think belongs to the whole of humanity; all that a man can feel belongs to him alone. He appears
to have understood the oscillation between social nature of knowledge (symbolic) and the individual nature of total
experience as expressed non-symbolically in the body (the unnamed real).
31 I would speculate that this division between real, symbolic, and imaginary and the material imagination is not adequate when
accounting for mathematics and perhaps not for music where all four modes are identical or nearly identical.
32 As superficially horrifying as this idea is, it contains an essential truth. In the final analysis, within limits, the truth of an

ideology is a question of power. If the question could be posed, no dispassionate scientist would be able to say which is
true, bourgeois ideology or proletarian ideology. Each is true for its class.
33 In the Platform of the International Communist Current we can read the following: …only marxism is capable of grasping
social reality in an objective and scientific manner, without any prejudices or mystifications of any sort. [sic] But of course there is no
mention of how it grasps this reality without any prejudice other than the trite reference to “historical analysis and
materialism” but I would ask an even more important question, why does it want to? Aren’t we deeply prejudiced?
Otherwise we really don’t need revolutionaries we need dispassionate research scientists! Or perhaps just damn good
computer programs. The ICC is a typical example of the marxology that simply asserts that its own version of Marxism is
science and everything is ideology. It is as sickening as it is dangerous!
32Harry Cleaver makes this same point when he writes: “relative surplus value and the theory of optimal factor pricing thus

express two different class perspectives on exactly the same phenomenon” in his essay “The Inversion of Class
Perspective” Open Marxism vol II p 108.


 16

of signs, and here the power of Capital over Labor is obvious. But, what is important is that the
forms of the ideology are indistinguishable to consciousness, consciousness itself is structured by the
integration of the symbolic quality of experience—the disembodied chair—and the Unnamed Real
experience of sitting on a chair for instance, in the specifically unique context. There is no
unprejudiced real, no truth, no false and no mystification, water will boil just the same. The problem
in the final analysis, for any ideology, appears when the ideology itself becomes so detached from the
structure of the procedural real and the unnamed real experience as to insist that the water won’t boil and
yet it does! All experience resides in the interstices between the Real and the Symbolic. However, it is
the third category that creates problems and possibilities for the domination of ideology, the
Imaginary. It is the Imaginary that must integrate the two previous modes. It is in the Imaginary that the
breech is open so to speak; it is here that ideology can ultimately fail its task of domination or
succeed in revolutionizing consciousness. By living through symbolically structured experience man is
constituted from birth as an ideological subject but can never escape the persistent reverberations of
the unnamed real; it is in the un-ruled, insubordinate, and unpredictable Imaginary that revolutionary
praxis is spawned.

Every individual has his own experience that is entirely unique to himself but he has this experience
in a context of shared social activity and shared language thus obviously a shared ideology that is
capable of explaining this experience. However, since every sign refracts a meaning outside of itself
in consciousness and every consciousness if composed of the unique convergence between the Real
and the Symbolic it is clear that every consciousness must reconstruct the symbolic in unique ways thus
providing the basic architecture of conscious experience. The Imaginary is working whenever there is
the consciousness of an experience. Individual signs shift meanings constantly depending on the
social context or the intersection of competing sign systems. What is essential is that the material
sign embodied in social production is reconfigured as a sign when disembodied in thought. That is it
shifts the material significance of the sign and becomes a source of a new Imaginary in consciousness
retroactively. Moreover, when the Imaginary is objectified—a new chair or new theory or piece of
music—it joins the historical accumulation and development of the Material Imagination that produces
a new level of experience, an experience that socially alters the Unnamed Real and the Symbolic
simultaneously.35 Here we see the possibility of a causal reversal. That which was once experienced in
one way is now experienced in another due to its displacement in the system of signs both materially
and for consciousness; effect become cause via the mediation of the Imaginary as it appears objectively
in the Material Imagination. By reordering the Symbolic, both objectively and subjectively, man can
reconfigure the structure of his own experience, that which was once his own cause now becomes his
effect, but of course always within the limits of the procedural necessity. Nevertheless, the linearity of the


























































35 Lacan himself defines this process as Praxis. “What is praxis…. It is the broadest term for designating a concerted action
of whatever kind by man, that enables him to change the real via the symbolic.” (J. Lacan Seminar XI ) cited in Fink.


 17

causal is disrupted in consciousness and man is no longer pure effect. Revolutionary
consciousness—the subject of this critique—emerges when self-positing becomes social and can
actualize itself purposively in its material immediacy in such a way that breaks the causal chain. 36

Summary & Provisional Implications



Marxism is a reflexive self-positing praxis. When we assert that Marxism is a reflexive theory of
social movement, we also mean that reflexivity is a praxis that is expressed materially and not merely
in thought (analysis). In this sense, Marxism “distills” self-consciously what humanity does historically
in its own social self-positing. But, it is also an ideology in so far as any ideology is defined as an
ensemble of ideas that situate social man existentially in time, in space and in nature. Man is
constituted as man ideologically from birth and therefore always lives between the ideally structured
reality of the symbolic in consciousness and his procedural activity that mediates his reproduction in
nature. Ideology is not a falsification of reality that can be opposed to the rational, scientific, truthful
apprehension of reality, if that reality is conceived as a thing outside of the self. It is better
understood as the structure of conscious being as it is socially constituted; it is mans’ continual effort
to reconcile himself with himself and nature and is therefore full of conflict and contradictions. In
mans’ effort to apprehend truth he must posit himself in truth and this takes many forms: political
theory, science, poetry, art, music etc. It should be clear however, that self-positing man is full of
prejudice and subjective desires, quite the contrary of the dispassionate scientist who would claim
that objective laws present themselves to man from the “facts” of history. This presumed objective
stance could only be conceived as anti-Marxist and anti-revolutionary precisely because it removes
the specifically revolutionary character of its praxis, turning that which appears external to man,
though in fact produced by man—history—into the source of scientific law to which man must
subordinate his will—fetishism. What Marxism posits above all is that man is onto-formative. It is this
singular distinction that makes Marxism potentially revolutionary. Revolutionary Marxism must
recognize that man becomes revolutionary subjectively, sensually and practically, not merely analytically.
The hothouse for revolutionary praxis is mans’ imagination. It is in the imagination where the onto-
formative praxis begins. Marxism itself cannot uncover the laws of the imagination, as the imagination
will always slip between the fingers of the structures imposed by the symbolic, in fact it is the
instability of the symbolic itself that permits the imagination to reach beyond any law-like
formulation. However, the ground can be cleared for the imaginary by specifically critiquing all
ideologies that suggest a fetishistic orientation towards social reality.


























































36
It well could be that music itself is a better model than natural science for conceptualizing revolutionary practice where
the imaginary, the symbolic, and the unnamed real come together as entirely united and indistinguishable from its objective
realization in the Material Imagination.



 18

Marx’s principle work was the critique of political economy as a bourgeois science, a science that
specifically fetishised economic categories as given, as the material reality from which culture arose.
Marx’s critique was primarily aimed at animating the self-conscious onto-formative character of social
man by clearing the ground of capitalist ideology that continually reduces man to a mere object of
historical forces. To the extent that the categories of economic science are understood as the objects
that form man, we are in the world of man as the fetish object of his own creation. But economic
activity and economic theory is one way of apprehending reality not the only. 37

Poetry [for example] is not a reality of a lower order than is economics. It is an equally human reality,
though of a different type and different form, with a different mission and significance. Economics
does not beget poetry, directly or indirectly, mediately or immediately. Rather, man forms both
economics and poetry as artifacts of human praxis. Materialist philosophy cannot buttress poetry with
economics. Nor can it grab economics as the one and only reality into assorted less real or almost
imaginary disguises such as politics, philosophy or art. Instead it has to ask the primary question about
the origin of economics itself. He who takes economics as given and further irreducible, as the
ultimately original source of everything and the only real reality which cannot be questioned further,
transforms economics into a result, a thing, an autonomous historical factor, and fetishises it in the
process. Modern materialism is therefore a radical philosophy because it does not treat mans’ artifacts
as the limit of analysis but penetrates to the roots of social reality, i.e. to man as the objective subject,
to man as the being the forms social reality. Kosik The Dialectic of the Concrete.

It is the self-positing nature of man and this alone that makes him potentially revolutionary; it is the
onto-formative side of man that must be the center of all critique, of all organization and of all activity
for revolutionaries. The work of Marx and Engels, and subsequent revolutionaries, is not much
different from the work of the “radicals” of the Renaissance when they placed man the maker at the
center of their implied critique of the dominant ideology, religion. 38 The superiority of Marxism to
science is precisely that it reveals the mechanism and the potential of creating reality and not merely
analyzing the mechanistic laws of the procedural. Eventually science will take it rightful place as an
ancillary tool/activity to the self-positing of the human specie.

Man posits his own existence and then seeks the means to overcome all obstacles to his goals
through his praxis. Mans’ self-positing is the necessary condition of the species but under the

























































37 It is a futile exercise to attempt to formulate a Marxist theory of art for example, or music, or sport, etc. Marxism can only
adequately theorize about such categories insofar as they come under the sway of the value-form of social relations and not
as autonomous trans-historical spheres of social reality in themselves. The categories of Marxist theory are the result of the
struggles within the value-form as capital seeks to realize itself in social relations. Such attempts to apply Marxist categories
to all historical forms of social reality merely buttresses totalitarian thought.
38 During the Renaissance, creating and working were still unified and humanism itself was born with the
assertion/recognition that man was self-forming. Pico alluded to mans’ superiority to the angels on the basis of his self-
forming activity. G. Manetti 1532 could write: “All that surround us is our own work, the work of men: all of the houses,
places, cities and marvelous buildings all over the countryside… seeing such marvels we understand that we can create even
better, more beautiful, more refined, more perfect things than hitherto…” cited in Kosik.


 19

conditions of capitalism he confronts a profoundly fetishized alienated society in which he experiences
himself as mere object. But he asserts himself time and again with an irrepressible, sometimes mad
refusal that resounds in a universal yes. He is able to conceive of a non-alienated life, because the
antithesis of this society is contained within it, revealed through the crack and fissures of its self-
generated contradictions. In this sense Marx’s communist man has more in common with
Nietzsche’s übermensch than with all of the social scientist of the last 200 years. Both seek self-
realization through the openings and cracks that appear as possibilities. Both are self-creating men,
unbound by the alienated instrumentalist demands of technocratic ends, self-negating men who live
across the endless oscillations of self-overcoming and reflexive self-positing. The essential difference
is that Nietzsche’s man is supra-historical and alone in the world; unable to account for the reality of
the historically contingent and the fundamentally social nature of self-creation, the übermensch is an
elitist. Both seek more life than this life gives but Nietzsche must retreat into his solitude finding
meaning in personal power. Communist man shares the übermensche’s drive for more life but finds its
affirmation in communion where he joyfully recognizes himself reflected in the eyes of another.

Are you finished?

Nearly
And where are you?
At the end.
But this looks just like the beginning!
Shall I start over?

B. York
02/15/2009

Sources

• Althusser, Louis Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso 2006)

• Beckhaus, H. “Between Philosophy and Science” Open Marxism vol. 2 (Pluto 1992)
• Bonefeld, Werner “Capital, Labor and Primitive Accumulation. (Libcom.org)
• Cleaver, Harry “The Inversion of Class Perspective” in Bonefeld, Gunn, Psychopedis, Open Marxism
vol.2 (Pluto 1992)
• Fink, Bruce The Lacanan Subject (Princeton 1995)
• Gunn, Richard “Against Historical Materialism” in Bonefeld, Gunn, Psychopedis, Open Marxism vol.2
(Pluto 1992)
• Kitching Gavin Marxism and Science (Penn State 1994)
• Kosik, Karel The Dialectic of the Concrete (Reidel 1967)
• Marazzi, Christian Capital and Language (Semiotext(e) 2008)
• Marx, Karl and Engles, F. The German Ideology (Prometheus 1998)
• Marx, Karl Capital vol.1. (Penguin 1976)
• Marx, Karl Grundrissa (Penguin 1993)


 20

 • Postone, Moishe Time, Labor and Social Domination (Cambridge 2003)
• Sohn-Rethel, Alfred Intellectual and Manual Labor, A Critique of Epistemology (Macmillan, 1976)
• Toscano, Alberto “Real Abstraction Revisited” (internet), “The Culture of Abstraction” in Theory,
Culture and Society 2008; 25;57
• Voloshinov, V. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Harvard 1986)


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