Of the Possibility of Immanent Revolt as Theory and Political Praxis (original) (raw)

Identities vol. X: "Of the Possibility of Immanent Revolt as Theory and Political Praxis"

The only way to immanently revolt against the world is the non-abstract way. Revolting against concrete occurrences of subjugation and violence rather than in the name of abstractions and visions of transformation of the world is political action "affected by immanence." It is also action determined by "interests" which are real and sensuous (or material), says Marx, rather than abstract or philosophical. According to Marx, abstraction itself is what ought to be combated and a world in consonance with the real or the material immediate exigencies should be created. The world will be always made of philosophy, Laruelle would say, and it will always already persecute the human in human. The constant revolution can transform it into a socio-political order which is observant of the "real interests" rather than abstractions, writes Marx. In that way, the world could become a more just and happier place, one where persecution is minimalised by virtue of the reversal in hierarchy between philosophy and the real whereby the former would succumb to the dictate of the latter.

The epistemic foundations of injustice: lessons from the Young Marx

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2021

This article intends to show to what extent the early Marxian categories of alienation, ideology and proletariat can serve to better understand current forms of epistemic injustice, as well as, conversely, how the latter can illuminate some unclear aspects of such concepts. In the first part, it will be explained the extent to which Marx's concept of alienation accounts for the experience of an individual in a world to whose norms she is subject, but which she cannot recognise as her own. It will be shown that Marx finds the answer in a form of emancipatory praxis linked to a transformative appropriation of social reality. In order to deepen the understanding of this idea of emancipation, the second part will analyse the Marxian concept of the proletariat. It will be argued that taking up some considerations about the Hegelian figure of the rabble, Marx distinguishes a "liberal" from a "human" form of emancipation. In the third part, a contemporary example will be used to show the usefulness of the young Marx's analyses concerning this dimension of emancipation struggles. In the fourth part, these ideas will be developed further through the concept of epistemic injustice, which has gained great importance in the recent studies that Critical Theory carries out of the different socio-epistemic blocks of an ideological nature that prevent articulating, communicating and overcoming negative experiences that hinder individual self-realisation. In this sense, it will be shown the importance of the Marxian categories of alienation and ideology to theoretically address current forms of epistemic injustice, and, in relation to this, it will be explained the transformative and constitutive function of the excluded in the creation of new sectors of reality through which their demands can be met.

Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence: Its Significance for Our Time

tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2018

How can Marx’s ideas help us with the problem of how to make new revolutionary beginnings in a time when the counterrevolution is ascendant, without losing sight of the need to prepare for the equally crucial question of what happens after the revolution? Capitalism has taken various forms as it developed, with the latest shaped by its endemic crisis since the mid-1970s generated by its falling rate of profit. Throughout these stages, the humanism and dialectic of Capital remain prime determinants of allowing Marxist responses not to stop at economic analyses but to release, rather than inhibiting, new revolutionary subjects and directions. Critical for the present moment is to take up Marx’s humanism and dialectic as crucial dimensions of his philosophy of revolution in permanence. This encompasses not alone the famous March 1850 Address to the Communist League, but also the full trajectory of Marx's revolutionary life and thought from the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts ...

A Marxian Account of Human Oppression

Accounts of oppression frequently focus on a) ‘the exploitation of man by man’, as for Sartre, or b) the exploitation of ‘man’ by autonomous structures, as in Althusser. This paper is interested in the situation for Marx, in which ‘man’ is exploited by capital. Here, it is not a situation of one person dominating another: this is a semblance, and both are being dominated by capital, one as a personification of capital, and the other as a means to augment capital. But capital is not an autonomous or natural structure, either. Capital is objectified, standardised, and neutralised human activity: it is the perfect universal equivalent, exchangeable for anything, but this does not stop it from being metamorphosed, solid, human activity. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, what we think is the natural world is in fact anything but that. It is rather direct and spontaneous human relations, after these relations have escaped us and become erected opposite us. These relations become a world, and this world begins to control us. In short, we are not dominated by ‘man’ or by ‘structure’, but by our own activity, or as Marx often writes, by our own dead. In this reading of Marx, he is a ‘phenomenologist’ of sorts, at least in so far as he rejects a static idea of subjects versus objects and postulates a continuity between ‘man and world’: ‘the two sides of ... the social individual’, again, as he writes in the Grundrisse. This phenomenological account of oppression will go beyond looking at ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ or human beings being determined by alien, external structures. With Marx, it will study human subjection to human activity, the present being subjected to the past, the living to the dead, the worker to the machine.

Thinking the Unthinkable/Global Realities: Eleven Theses on Marx's Eleventh Thesis*

Sociological Inquiry, 2010

Marx's Eleventh Thesis has long been code for the social theorist's duty ultimately to do more than think to world. Global realities early in the twenty-first century have rendered the Eleventh Thesis feeble if not futile. There is no singular ''world'' (not a trivial fact). Social thought must encounter a series of Unthinkables that Marx himself understood to a degree but, in the Eleventh Thesis, as in all of his general and specific politic advice, believed were not definitive barriers to what amounted to liberal politics that history has proven will always be thwarted by the resisted of regressive forces. [In which the shrunken passages can be skipped as need be; And, in either case, written with due respect for the shrinkage of proto-global time-, Which has been forced, under pressure, into dark holes Where space becomes mass without volume and time moves at speeds so great that, over interstellar time, They, the dark holes, came to appear as perfectly stable densities without extension] Marx's Eleventh Thesis of 1845 continues to challenge social philosophies, even now, well into the early years of the 2000s. ''The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.'' Today, even this short declamation can be opened to inspection. Philosophers are not any longer trapped in the nineteenth-century debate over ideal and allegedly more real material factors. Plus which, it may be that the apparent collapse of the ideal ⁄ material distinction entails, against all reason, the troubling of the once evident distinction between thought and practice. Interpretation of history is, today, a very specific kind of hermeneutic that far exceeds anything that Marx (and Engels) could have drawn from the philosophical debates that stood behind the texts in the 1840s. Then, given the predominance of Hegel's idealism in German philosophy, and beyond, materialism was caught in a certain poverty of its weak philosophical foundations. If Feuerbach, much less Stirner and others of the day, were, then, food for a counter-idealist philosophy of history, Marx's own impoverished early theories of ideology and philosophy can be forgiven.

Karl Marx as a Philosopher of Human Emancipation

BRILL eBooks, 1998

A crucial element of Marx's edifice is his fight for human emancipation. From the critical analysis of Hegel's political philosophy to the Capital he considers the issue of emancipation and discovers circumstances, in which work and practice of human beings lead to alienation of social relations. The contradiction typical of capitalism becomes overstepped in the revolutionary practice of the proletariat that can fulfil its emancipatory mission breaking consciously through quasi-natural conditions of its social reproduction. Even the revolutionary movements that failed contributed to the "progress of the recognition of freedom" much more than traditional political institutions. I From its beginnings of his critical analysis of Hegel to the uncompleted late work A Critique of Political Economy, Marx's philosophy is committed to the goal of human emancipation. I should like, therefore, to introduce my hypotheses with a quote of the young Marx from 1843, since it expresses, as it were, the driving motif of his whole philosophical and political activity. "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself. Human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separated his social power from himself as political power." (Marx-Engels 1978, p.46 / MEW 1, 370)