Why Humanists Are Actually Dumb

If you haven't run across humanists yet, lucky you. But you probably will sooner or later. First thing you will probably notice is their incredible self-conceit. They are very, very sure that they understand Marx and almost no one else does: Not you, not Lenin, not Engels, and certainly not such nobodies as Fidel or Stalin.

What is this profound insight that only the big-brained can discover? Why it's this: They will tell you that ultimately Marx aimed not merely at the liberation of the working class but at the liberation of all of humanity, of all social classes, who suffer from the same problem: man's alienation from his essential species being.

Actually they'll probably just say alienation. Alienation is kind of their word. But alienation can refer to a LOT of things, like in the “inalienable rights” in the US Declaration of Independence, or in the Grundrisse where Marx talks about “the involuntary alienation of feudal landed property”. If you actually UNDERSTAND the word alienation, you get that it's just a synonym for estrangement, and a lot of things can get alienated from a lot of things.

No, the alienation our humanists are concerned with is one particular alienation: man's alienation from his own essential nature.

I hope that once we clarify what “man” is being alienated from here, it's obvious to you that this is dumb. Things don't HAVE essential, unchanging natures. If you have any background in hard sciences at all you know that. You're descended from a monkey, sure, but before that, going back far enough, a mushroom, and before that, a little amoeba-like organism. What is the essential thing that has stayed the same in all that time? And if you have changed so much from your ancestors, why shouldn't your descendants continue to change?

In fact, a major aspect of Marx's project is precisely to show that things in the social and ideological sphere change, just as things in biology or cosmology change... That capitalism evolved, had a beginning, and will have an end, just as much as the solar system evolved, had a beginning, and will have an end.

Take this, from the Manifesto:

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.

Right? All this shit we have been told is eternal, based in human nature, etc., is actually just particular to a certain state of society.

It IS actually true that in a few of his earliest, most obscure writings, Marx talked about man's alienation from his species being and this kind of crap. And the humanists think they are very clever for having discovered that. But they have somehow FAILED to discover Marx's later refutation and dissection of these views, including in his LEAST obscure work, the Manifesto.

Let's start with this example from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 — called manuscripts because they were not published in Marx's lifetime nor at all until the Soviets published them in the 1930s:

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

Right? Human self-estrangement, or, if you like, self-alienation. Communism as the “return of man to himself”. This is the crucial idea that, according to the humanists, is necessary if you want to understand Marx's later works. (Yes, the vital key to unlock the true meaning of Marxism is in a book Marx never bothered to have published in his own lifetime.)

Now, let's go forward to the German Ideology, which Marx started in 1845, only about a year after the Manuscripts:

The individuals, who are no longer subject to the division of labour, have been conceived by the philosophers as an ideal, under the name “Man”. They have conceived the whole process which we have outlined as the evolutionary process of “Man,” so that at every historical stage “Man” was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force of history. The whole process was thus conceived as a process of the self-estrangement of “Man,” and this was essentially due to the fact that the average individual of the later stage was always foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on to the individuals of an earlier. Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract image of the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the whole of history into an evolutionary process of consciousness.

If you study that closely, and figure out what he actually means, here we are DISSECTING the concept of “Man” and refuting the notion of “self-estrangement of 'Man'”. That is, in this passage, Marx is demolishing exactly the basic ideas that our humanists will tell you are the hidden essence of Marx. Note also that now Marx has started putting “Man” in scare quotes, because he is beginning to analyze not an abstract man, but concrete human beings who are not all just about the same as each other, but are divided into social classes. From here on out, “Man” ceases to be the subject of Marx's inquiry, and instead we see the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and so on.

The German Ideology is relatively obscure, but I point this part out to you for two reasons. One is that it shows how quickly Marx moved past the ideas of the Manuscripts, refuting them only about a year later. The second is that Marx actually takes the time and trouble here to work through the errors of reasoning in the Manuscripts.

In the Manifesto, he is much less gentle:

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General”, and so forth.

Now, that is literally the only appearance of the word “alienation” — this allegedly key concept of Marxism — in the whole of the Manifesto. He does say, specifically, “Alienation of Humanity”, which is exactly what our humanists are talking about. And Marx is plainly mocking this self-alienation of Man junk.

But the dunking, though hilarious, actually has deep content behind it. That passage occurs in the larger section of the Manifesto concerned with the “True Socialists”. And in there, he explains how it all got twisted. The section is not long. You've probably read it before. You should read it again and think a little more about what it means. But the bottom line is this:

German idealists took notice of socialism because it emerged as a political demand as part of a real struggle taking place in France. The same struggle was NOT taking place in Germany, so the Germans had no direct connection to it. And they took these real world political ideas — ideas emerging from real political struggles and not philosophical mumbo jumbo — and worked them into their idealist philosophical systems — Hegelianism or Feuerbachianism or whatever — and distorted them in the process. “Silly”, Marx calls it, and “philosophical nonsense.”

So, where does that leave us? Marx had a humanistic phase early on, but he grew out of it.

This isn't odd. Not remotely. If you understand the first thing about dialectics, you understand that everything changes. Obviously Marx isn't exempt from that. And if you are a communist who comes from a non-socialist country — as Marx did — then you know very well that you also had a political development: You probably started out as a capitalist and went through one or more stages of more vague anti-capitalism — anarchy or Trotskyism or whatever — before arriving at Leninism. Well, Marx also had a political development.

Particularly, Marx had a political development of emerging from German academic philosophy — Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach, etc. You probably know that about him. He had a doctorate. He read an absolutely stunning amount. And he devoured libraries full of German idealism. This German idealism was very intellectually compelling as philosophies go. So, yes, Marx's early writings are tainted by German idealism. How would they NOT be?

To be clear, also, it was not a process of pure thought that brought Marx out of idealism. In January of 1843, Marx's newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, was ordered suppressed. The True Socialists were no help. Marx then had to flee to France, where he connected with the real, living socialist movement.

However, Marx's political and philosophical transition is not difficult to understand or to see, even just reading Marx's work themselves. Our humanists are too smart to understand it.

So, that's the intellectual content of humanism: taking some ideas from the Manuscripts and missing the parts of Marx's later works where he explains why those ideas are wrong — not to mention having a poor enough grasp of dialectical materialism that you can't, yourself, see the problem in these ideas. Intellectually, humanism is actually not all that.

The POLITICAL content of humanism is where the meat is, the reason that it continues to pop up every so often. Humanism was important in dismantling the communist movement in Europe in the second half of the 20th century. It was a favorite of Krushchevites and Eurocommunists. Humanism was used as an ideological weapon against the USSR. The notion was that Soviet Marxism left out a crucial element of Marxism — the crucial element actually being German idealism. And in this way humanism was used to cut the Marxist legs out from under the Soviet Union by accusing the Soviets of being bad Marxists. Furthermore, the notion of a basic human nature which was the same across all social classes played into Khrushchev's idea of the “state of the whole people”.

Humanism is a distortion of Marxism that serves the interest of the bourgeoisie.

There are two other relatively minor points that relate to this. One is that the transition we are talking about was actually occurring in 1845 and 1846, and was largely complete by the time of the Manifesto in 1848. That's important if you get on a Marx kick and start reading every bit of his stuff. It will help you make sense of the early stuff and why it is so absolutely impenetrable and so hard to reconcile with Marx's later, well, materialism.

The second is that Marx had to dig his way out of German idealism. Some Marxists mix this up, study Hegel, and start substituting Hegel's idealism for the mature Marx's materialism. If you read Hegel, whatever, but it won't illuminate Marx's ideas for you, because those are the ideas Marx had to dig his way out of. Reading Hegel will not make you smarter, but if you aren't careful, it MIGHT make you dumber.

Finally, I should mention that the key ideas in this are ripped pretty directly from Louis Althusser's For Marx. (If I was a classier person, I would probably have put that at the start.) So, if you want a much fuller discussion of all of this, but written in the language of a top French academic and devoid of the illustrative examples from Marx's writings, Althusser's your guy.