With such ‘conjuring tricks' (ibid.: 131), consciousness ceases to be an attribute of real individuals, and is instead transformed into an independently-acting historical subject in its own right, the ‘spirit of the age', or whatever. The concept of an attribute is mistakenly concretized as an entity. In Marx's words, first of all, an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based upon the abstraction' (ibid.: 542).
Marx's denial of the determining role of the ideal in history, then, is based on a prior denial of the very existence of the ideal as a separable entity. Consciousness is precisely not a thing in itself, and the fundamental error of the idealists is to treat it as such, to attribute to conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness . . . an independent existence' (ibid.: 30, emphasis added). Where for idealism ‘the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual', Marx's starting-point is ‘the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness (ibid.: 38). Consciousness is my relationship to my surroundings' (ibid.: 42), it ‘can never be anything else than conscious existence (ibid.: 37). These passages all come from The German Ideology. But nearly 30 vears later, in that same text in which Marx speaks of setting the Hegelian dialectic right side up again', his criticism is exactly the same - that the ideal subject of Hegel's historiography is a purely fictitious one:
To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (1873: 19)
Idealism's historical subjects are constituted by first abstracting, then reifying what is in fact merely a predicate – consciousness - of real subjects. But Marx's critique is less an inversion of the subject/ predicate relation than an insistence that such predicates cannot, in the nature of things, be subjects at all. The only subjects of history, he insists, are real, living individuals' themselves.
The quotations I have given so far argue the fictitious status of the ideal, which is my main concern in this chapter given that Marx and Engels repeatedly qualified ‘superstructures' thus. But it is equally important to realize that the other term in the equation - the ‘material’ – is also and ipso facto transformed. If consciousness ceases to be regarded as ‘a living individual’, but instead is recognized as an attribute or predicate of real living individuals' themselves, then the material existence of these individuals can no longer be conceptualized in ways which exclude their consciousness. The material premiss from which historical materialism starts is not, abstractly, matter', as opposed to ‘spirit' (or Lenin's ‘consciousness, thought, sensations’). It is real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live' (1846a: 31) – real individuals who are amongst other things conscious, and act on the basis of their conceptions. We have seen that such purposeful action is what for Marx defines labour as a distinctively human activity, and differentiates it from superficially analogous phenomena, like the 'labours’ of bees and beavers, elsewhere in the natural world (above, p. 28).
This is, of course, the burden of Marx's famous Theses on Feuerbach. The fault in Feuerbach's materialism (which among other things renders it ahistorical) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object . . . but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively'. This active side was developed abstractly by idealism' (1845b). Stirner's understanding of matter' is similarly dismissed as an ‘abstraction, an idea' (1846a: 109), empiricism branded as ‘still abstract' because it treats history as a collection of 'dead facts' (ibid.: 38), and ‘so-called objective historiography' denounced as reactionary' because it apprehends 'the historical conditions independent of activity' (ibid.: 52). A quarter of a century later, Marx was to reiterate this dismissive characterization of objective historiography' in connection with a reissue of his Eighteenth Brumaire, a text concerned centrally with the puzzle of how an individual, Louis Bonaparte, could come to play the central historical role he did (1869: 144).
Marx is precisely unlike his materialist precursors in his inclusion, within what he understood as the realm of material life, of those attributes of human beings – the ‘active side’ – which were previously separated off under the illusory guise of the ideal. Indeed, what he retained from the idealist tradition, whilst resituating it in terms of the natural history of humanity rather than the biography of spirit, was a conception of the internality of the relation between what Spinoza called thought and extension. The reason inversion is so inadequate a metaphor for this critique should by now be evident. The metaphor suggests a simple reversal of terms – material' and ideal' - which leaves their referents intact. But what Marx actually does is to challenge these terms themselves. He denies the validity of the distinction of material and ideal, as previously drawn – including by materialists - in the first place, and it is the presumed separability of the two which forms the specific target of his atfack. Material and ideal can be separated, for the social world, only at the cost of the abstraction' or reification of both.
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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