The following is a critical reconstruction of the collaboration between Bauer and Marx between 1839 and 1842. The turbulences in the period in question reveal themselves in Marx’s thought as well as in his relationship with Bruno Bauer. Correspondingly, Marx’s detours, false paths, dead ends and abandoned work are therefore made the focus of this study. The ambivalent initial relations between the two of them, which both made their collaboration possible and hindered it, clearly go back further than 1841, when (...) Bauer was not yet an atheist and was still a proponent of church doctrine. This was the Bruno Bauer that Marx had come to know in the Doctor’s Club. We then meet Bauer the atheist at the end of 1839 or perhaps the beginning of 1840, as he was planning a comprehensive attack on orthodox theology and wanted Marx to fight on his side. This attack continued in Bauer’s Trumpet and in Hegel’s Doctrine. (shrink)

Karl Marx’s 1852 work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte opens with the famous remark that men “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.” He goes on to argue that whatever happens in the present time arises from and is a reaction to a political past. Recollecting and interpreting the past for present purposes requires a language. Such a language is not naturally given but needs to be socially constructed. What is more, its (...) vocabulary and grammar stem from linguistic legacies of past ideologies. Marx draws in this regard an analogy, comparing acquisition of a political language with mastering a natural language: “a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.”. (shrink)

There are episodes in Marx’s life that go unnoticed or that are considered insignificant in Marxian scholarship. A case in point is that Marx wrote a treatise on Christian art between 1841 and 1842 and a group of excerpts (the Bonn Notebooks) on the history of religious art that resulted from it. The treatise and the accompanying notebooks are either completely absent from Marx biographies and studies on young Marx or they are mentioned only in passing; if the notebooks are (...) considered at all, one portion is usually singled out while the rest is effectively ignored. The present piece traces Marx’s motives for occupying himself with religious art as well as his interests, shifting from Christian, Greek and Egyptian arts to fetishism and idolatry. This study intends to highlight that young Marx was more involved in questions concerning the political culture of aesthetics than we usually think. The Bonn Notebooks provide access to a more vivid image of Marx in this regard than previous scholarship has suggested. (shrink)

Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been a common but somewhat unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. The entire Engels debate separates into two opposite views: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s “new materialism” vs. Engels the self-educated genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has not enjoyed so far is a critical reading that (...) considers the relationship between different layers of this standard text: authorial, textual, editorial, and interpretational. Informed by a historical hermeneutic, this book questions the elements that structure the debate on the Dialectics of Nature. It analyzes different political and philosophical functions attached to Engels’ text, and relocates the meaning of the term “dialectics” into a more precise context. Arguing that Engels’ dialectics is less complete than we usually think it is but that he achieved more than most scholars would like to admit, this book fully documents and critically analyzes Engels’ intentions and concerns in the Dialectics of Nature, the process of writing, and its reception and edition history in order to reconstruct the solved and unsolved philosophical problems in this unfinished work. (shrink)

There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx’s theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force, creating its own gravitational center toward which the interest of later generations of historians, social theorists, and political activists has been pulled. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital (...) for over one and a half centuries, young Marx’s initial exploration of the term rarely enjoyed critical attention. This is especially true in regard to the period from his early journalism in the Rheinische Zeitung (1842–43) to his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. (shrink)

Engels’ name stands and falls today with a variety of his contributions to socialist thought and Marxist philosophy. Yet there is one particular component of the Marxist body of thought that has been subject to a group of controversies for quite some time for which Engels is usually held responsible: dialectics and dialectics of nature. It is curious and ironic that a theoretical contribution to an intellectual tradi tion within the history of European political philosophy could be perceived and depicted (...) as a major distortion of that tradition. In Engels’ case, this irony is captured by the phrase “the Engels problem.” In this chapter, I will first briefly summarize what “the Engels problem” is about and lay out its connection to the reception his tory of Engels’ dialectics. Then, I will delve into the general outlines of Engels’ dialectics and focus on his intentions, tasks, and purposes in pursuing dialectics in some of his prominent works on this theme from 1870s to 1880s, most notably in Anti-Dühring and the Dialectics of Nature. In the final section, I will briefly discuss some of the open questions of Engels’ natural dialectics. (shrink)

Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has (...) not enjoyed so far is a critical reflection upon the relationship between different layers of this text: authorial, textual, editorial and interpretational. Informed by a historical hermeneutic, inquiry into the elements that structure the debate on “Dialectics of Nature,” and into the different political and philosophical functions attached to it, makes it possible to relocate the meaning of “dialectics” in a more precise context. Engels’ dialectics is less complete than we usually think it is, but he achieved more than most scholars would like to admit. (shrink)

Several years ago Guglielmo Carchedi (2008; 2012) published in S&S two interesting pieces on Marx’s dialectics and mathematics. His basic aim was to discover whether Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts provide a new insight into Marx’s dialectics. The reading he suggested was addressed to Marx alone, i.e., without Hegel and Engels. This, he argued, is the only way to grasp Marx’s dialectics if one wants to understand Marx in his own terms. Since Marx never explicated his notion of dialectics, we ought to (...) derive it from Marx’s own work. To this end, Carchedi first defined “dialectics as a method of social research” (Carchedi, 2008, 416), and then listed three principles of dialectics: 1) “all phenomena are always both realized and potential”; 2) “they are always both determinant and determined”; 3) they are “always subject to movement and change” (ibid.). Later he added a fourth principle: 4) “social phenomena’s movement (change) is tendential” (Carchedi, 2012, 547). He emphasized that these principles are limited to society and not to be confused with nature, because society, unlike nature, necessarily involves “human volition and consciousness” (ibid.). For this reason, “Engels’ dialectics of nature cannot be applied to society” (ibid.), a claim he also asserted in his book Behind the Crisis (2011, 37–8). (shrink)

What follows is an attempt to question the ways of how Engels coined the term “dialectics” in his Dialectics in Nature. My focus is directed by an interest in re-reading Engels’s undertaking from the perspective of his much-celebrated and downplayed Plan 1878. I would like to make clear from the outset that, by Engels’s dialectics, the Plan 1878 and Dialectics of Nature, I refer neither to a complete and compact account of dialectics nor to the list of contents of Engels’s (...) work nor to a “book.” Rather, I occupy myself with a “work in progress” that reached some stage of maturity at the end of 1870s (documented in a plan), and a work before it posthumously became a “book.” In this regard, a couple of remarks seem to be in order. (shrink)

Der von Marx in K I ausgearbeitete Begriff fasst M als »gegliedertes Maschinensystem« (23/401), »technische Einheit« (400) der »Kooperation gleichartiger« oder »Kombination verschiedenartiger« und einander ergänzender »Arbeitsmaschinen« (401), die ihren »Impuls« vom »Herzschlag des gemeinsamen ersten Motors« mittels eines »Transmissionsmechanismus« empfangen (400). Ihre Anwendung, »das moderne Fabriksystem« (442), ergibt »das ökonomische Paradoxon, dass das gewaltigste Mittel zur Verkürzung der Arbeitszeit in das unfehlbarste Mittel umschlägt, alle Lebenszeit des Arbeiters und seiner Familie in disponible Arbeitszeit für die Verwertung des Kapitals zu (...) verwandeln« (430). Möglich wird dies, weil M die »Leistungsfähigkeit des Werkzeugs« von »den persönlichen Schranken menschlicher Arbeitskraft [emanzipiert]« (442). Indem mit »dem Arbeitswerkzeug auch die Virtuosität in seiner Führung« – sowie die dafür erforderliche Muskelkraft – »vom Arbeiter auf die Maschine« übergeht (ebd.), produziert M »teils durch Einstellung dem Kapital früher unzugänglicher Schichten der Arbeiterklasse« (430) – »jugendliche Arbeiter (unter 18 Jahren), Weiber und Kinder [bilden] das weit vorwiegende Element des Fabrikpersonals« (473) –, »teils durch Freisetzung der von der Maschine verdrängten Arbeiter, eine überflüssige Arbeiterpopulation« (430). (shrink)

Born in 1898 in South-West Germany, the son of a lumberjack, a student of Karl Korsch in Jena, a colleague of Georg Lukács in Moscow, a militant of the Communist Part of Germany (KPD), and later a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB), Schmückle was a prominent Marx expert, a literary critic and an editor of the first Marx- Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1). This article examines whether Schmückle can be called a Western Marxist. To this end, it first investigates (...) the theoretic, geological and social patterns of Western Marxism and then detects similarities and differences between Schmückle and some pioneering figures of Western Marxism. My main contention is that Western Marxist historiography potentially excludes much of what stands and falls with Schmückle’s intellectual biography and political identity. The way Western Marxism would read Schmückle leads to the conclusion that Schmückle was a Westerner and a Marxist, but hardly a Western Marxist. This suggests that either Western Marxism applies to him in a very loose sense or, alternatively, the term can be empirically falsified in Schmückle’s case. (shrink)

The concept “immaterial labor” is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary social theory. In his 2007 work The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics, Sean Sayers offered an extensive response to several critical redefinitions of labor (Habermas, Benton, Arendt) and immaterial labor (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri). Sayers returned to the subject in his more recent book, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes.1 As one of the few accounts that contests the contemporary Marx critics with regard (...) to fundamental concepts such as labor and immaterial labor, his contribution should be taken seriously. (shrink)

For decades, the question of whether dialectics applies to nature has been a hotly debated topic in the Marxian literature. A number of authors have claimed that the Marxist outlook on nature and natural sciences has been for-mulated by Engels alone. According to this view, Marx, unlike Engels, was concerned not with trans-historical laws governing the universe but with some particular laws of society. This anti-Engels camp, so to speak, mainly tended to draw bold lines between Marx and Engels, and (...) charged Engels with dis-torting Marxʼs original ideas of dialectics by some kind of reductionism, sci-entism and positivism that might also end up in an obsolete idealism. Engels was „following Hegelʼs mistaken lead“ by extending „the method to apply also to nature“. However, dialectics was „limited ... to the realms of history and society“.2 Some others objected to this view, and characterized any at-tempt to sharply contrast Engels with Marx as concealed mysticism and idealism. For the pro-Engels camp, Engelsʼs conception of nature was „in full conformity“ with Marxʼs materialist philosophy.4 Dialectics of nature was „no invention of Engels“. On the contrary, „it was worked out in collaboration with Marx and had his full agreement. (shrink)

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs’ approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs’ views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users’ data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx’s laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0 economy. It is possible (...) to avoid Fuchs’ errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media economy. (shrink)

Cambridge’deki büyük akademik cemaatin sakinleri olan bizler bir araya geldik ve hoşgörü ve onun egemen politik iklim içerisindeki yeri hakkında dostça ama ateşli bir tartışma yürüttük. Okuyucu, bizim nerelerde aynı düşüncede olmadığımızı bulmakta hiçbir zorluk çekmeyecektir. Diğer taraftan, farklı başlangıç noktalarından ve farklı yollardan hareketle yaklaşık olarak aynı yere ulaştık. Her birimiz için, egemen hoşgörü kuramı ve pratiğinin, incelendiği takdirde, korkunç politik gerçekleri gizlemeye yarayan bir maske olduğu ortaya çıktı. Kızgınlığın tonu makaleden makaleye keskin bir şekilde artmakta; belki de (...) boş yere, okuyucuların bu noktaya getiren akıl yürütmeyi takip edeceklerini umuyoruz. Nihayetinde bu kızgınlık hem kafa hem de kalpte ikamet etmektedir…. (shrink)

“İntihar Üzerine” (Ek 1) ve “Ruhun Ölümsüzlüğü Üzerine” (Ek 2) denemeleri, David Hume’un din bağlamında dogmatik inanışları, uslamlamaları en keskin bir biçimde eleştirdiği yazılarıdır. Görgül felsefesinin temel doğruları ve izlediği kuşkucu yöntem uyarınca ortaya koyduğu sonuçlar, bu denemelerin hem yayınlandıkları dönemde hem de sonrasında pek çok olumsuz eleştiriyle karşılaşmasına yol açmıştır. İnsanın doğasına ilişkin her türlü konuyu soruşturma niyetliliği ile yola çıkan Hume, dogmatik dinin ve uygulamalarının köklendiği inanışları ve uslamlamalarını da aynı niyetle irdelemiştir. Özellikle döneminde yaşanan toplumsal sorunların (...) bu dogmalara duyulan kuşkusuz inançlardan köklendiğini göstermeye çalıştığı bu iki denemenin, yine aynı dogmalara dayanarak eleştirilmesi, basımının engellenmesi ve metinlere müdahale edilmesi ise ironiktir. Bu çalışmada, Hume’un her iki denemedeki savlarının bir çözümlemesi değil, denemelerde ele alınan sorunun ne kadar gerçek olduğu, bu iki denemenin yayınlanma süreci örnek gösterilerek incelenecektir. (shrink)

Kant’ın 1781 tarihli Saf Aklın Eleştirisi adlı çalışmasına kadar geçen felsefî kariyeri, genel olarak literatürde, onun “eleştiri öncesi” dönemi olarak adlandırılır. Bu dönemin belirleyici unsuru, Kant’ın bir taraftan Newton fiziki diğer taraftan da Leibniz-Wolff metafiziki ile sürekli boğuşmasıdır. Bu süreç içerisinde Kant, aynı zamanda, hernekadar berrak ve keskin bir biçimde formüle edilmese de “eleştirel felsefe”ye doğru giden ilk açılımları da sunar. Bu çalışmanın amacı, Kant’ın sözü edilen düşünce dönemini mercek altına alarak onun “eleştiri öncesi” düşüncelerine dâir genel bir perspektif (...) çizmektir. *** Kant’s philosophical approach until the Critique of Pure Reason published at 1781 is generally designated in the history of philosophy as Kant’s “pre-critical” period. The determinative matter of this phase is a deep and continuous struggle of him with both Newtonian physics and metaphysics of Leibniz-Wolff school. Although he never clearly formulated those problems and solution proposals about the basic philosophical and metaphysical ideas of his “critical” period, there are some conceptual-patterns in his early writings that can be seen as pioneer ideas with respect to his posterior thoughts. The aim of this study is to present a general perspective about Kant’s “pre-critical” period by following his early texts. (shrink)

[English] This paper aims to discuss ten traditional and contemporary methodological paradigms in African philosophy, and demonstrates how they may apply to African environmental ethics research. The methods include: Ethno-philosophy, Sage Philosophy, Conversational Philosophy, Conceptual Mandelanization, Eco-Afrocentricism, Indigenous Language Analysis, Eco-Afro-feminism, Conceptual Decolonization, Storytelling Philosophy, and Cultural Adaptationism. The significance and limitations of the methodologies are highlighted. The concept and principles of African environmental ethics are analyzed and discussed to facilitate an understanding of the conceptual frameworks that underpin the methodologies. (...) In conclusion, the discourse demonstrates that environmental ethics research in Africa should be based on African philosophical methodologies so as to facilitate production of research that will be relevant in African contexts. -/- [Annang] N̄wed nduongo ami ayem ibene nwọ́d mme n̄kaan nne mfa usung unam nduongo ke vilọsọvi Afrịke , nne nte amọ ekeme iwam unam nduongo mbanga ido ukpeme nkan-nkuk ke Afrịke. Mme usung unam nduongo ami nsehe ade ami: vilọsọvi mben ufọk, vilọsọvi n̄kan ideen, vilọsọvi nneme, vilọsọvi Mandela, “Eco-Afrocentricism”, nduongore usem utiit ajid, vilọsọvi ibaan Afrịke, vilọsọvi mkpọk-nyak, vilọsọvi n̄ke, nne ukpep ido idung agwo. N̄wed ami abene awọd mme ikek nne nde mem idem usung nduongo ami. N̄wed ami atang mkpọ abanga se ido ukpeme nkan-nkuk ke Afrịke anwongo nne mme itai amọ, nne nte amọ ewam mbon nduongo ediọhọ nnanga ekpekakpa ibọrọ nduongo amọ. Ke n̄suuk ikọ, ukpep ami mkpọ abene awọd ate ke ekpena ekama usung nduongo vilọsọvi Afrịke enam nduongo ebanga ido ukpeme nkan-nkuk ke Afrịke man ibọrọ nduongo asanga akekem nne se adiiwam Afrịke. (shrink)