Customer Reviews

Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Rockmore's book on Marx appears to be very promising. On the back cover it states that Rockmore seeks to recover Marx' philosophical ideas and his relation to Hegel, and that he wants to do this free of "Marxism" (by which writers these days usually mean the official Leninist party line). So far, so good. But unfortunately, Rockmore fails to write even one page that is not either stating the obvious or clearly false.

Most of the book itself can be skipped entirely, since it consists of a recap of Hegel's philosophy of history and then an overview of the works of Marx. It's not clear why this was included in its entirety in Rockmore's work and it is certainly superfluous considering the very large amount of philosophical overviews of Marx' collected work in print today, but apparently it's quantity that counts here. Rockmore's analysis itself is not particularly bad, it must be granted, though nothing special either. Instead of reading these chapters, one might do better to read for example Allen Wood's book on Marx: that also gives an overview of Marx focusing on his philosophy, and is also written by a general opponent of Marx (though not an unsympathetic one, but Wood is a Kant specialist).

The first chapter and the final two are the extent of Rockmore's actual thesis. In this, he defends three points:
- Marx did not entirely abandon philosophy at any point in his career;
- Marx was a Hegelian;
- Marx was an idealist.
This of itself is already very odd, considering that the first is very well-known and not really disputed by anyone. Certainly writers such as Lukacs feel that Marx went beyond philosophy, but this means philosophy as mere abstract contemplation such as Kant or the scholastics, not philosophy as 'abstract thought of any kind'.

The second claim is muddled by Rockmore's tendency to go on the defensive where Hegel is involved, wanting to save him from his harshest critics who claim Hegel merely conceived of history in a theological manner. This may or may not be a correct criticism, but in any case it has little to do with Marx, who rejected Hegel for misunderstanding the nature of the relation between civil society, the economy and the state in history. At some points Rockmore does mention this, but in the last two chapters he suddenly beats a hasty retreat and simply states that anyone who reasons in a historicist manner can be considered "Hegelian", and that, therefore, Marx was a Hegelian. Why this is triumphantly presented as a discovery and why we should consider this a meaningful analysis in the first place is left to the reader.

The same approach also characterizes Rockmore's analysis in his third and most bizarre claim, the one where Marx appears as an idealist. He sets out by correctly stating that idealism can mean various things, and that the idealism of Berkeley and Plato is not the same as that of Kant or Hegel (though he overstates the difference). Then he quotes Marx as saying that the only way man can perceive the world is through his mind. Just like with the claim about the "Hegelianism" of Marx, this is suddenly adequate to call someone meaningfully an idealist, and voilà, Rockmore has established that Marx was really an idealist all the time! The whole issue of the analytical priority of mind or matter, or the question of theology vs economy, etc. are forgotten entirely.

It may sound hard to believe that this is really all there is to the book, especially considering the positive reviews of the other readers here on Amazon, but that can't be helped. I'm quite baffled as to why this was published. Any undergraduate student paper could do what Rockmore did, and smart students can do better.

Even if you consider Marxism some phantom of evil it would be appropriate to get to the bottom of the theoretical problem case of its history and endgame. The reason is that the bits and pieces run through the blood stream of progressive groups attempting change as a series of half-understood fallacies which hamper correct thinking.
Rockmore's treatment of Marx here is therefore an interesting effort to return to the source and differentiate that from what came later.
That is useful up to a point, and it is true that Engels seems to be the source of a series of misunderstandings culminating in the doctrines of the Second Internationale. But it is not so easy to get Marx off the hook with Engels as the fall guy. The inuendo of smart Marx and dumb Engels gets a bit tiresome. All the problems with Marxism spring from errors in Marx's reasoning and the incoherent bits of Hegel. Figures of the Second Internationale have been dealt a bum rap in one way, since they were buried by Leninism. Who remembers that Plekhanov and Kautsky were appalled by Bolshevism or the several books of Kausky trying to expose Lenin. So, despite their confusions of theory, some figures in the Second Internationale were on the ball to some degree. We have been brainwashed to think Marxists were unable to critique their own ideology.
But the main focus of Rockmore's interesting text is on the complexities of Marx's development, seen as a philsopher in the vein of Hegel as much as an economist and historical materialist. The relationship to Hegel is a very elusive subject and it is here that the whole screwup begins. It never happens that anyone gets the 'dialectic' straight in its relationship to ideas of historical law or freedom and necessity. The whole mix is probably the number one best way to completely confuse disciples. Is it possible to ever get it straight, or at least free the left from the constant repetition of errors?
A very interesting study.

I find it hard to judge Rockmore's thesis that Marx was really an 'Objective idealist' because Rockmore's writing is so poor and downright confusing.Although I have covered much of the material he is describing I still found myself constantly having to go over and over what he wrote due to his obtuse and eliptical phrasing and subsequent lack of clarity.Rockmore's review of Marx's work is more a series of descriptions of his work rather than explanations.But even here he doesn't describe the most central aspects of Marx's work i.e.in his description of the contents of Marx's 'Capital'he doesn't even mention the law of the falling rate of profit and the crisis of over production and under consumption (see Capital vol 3).If you already know Marx's work then the review is pointless and if you dont it's pretty much useless.
At the end of the review Rockmore looks at the relationship between Marx and Hegel.His argument seems to be that Marx didn't really understand Hegel and in fact his so called inversion of Hegel's dialectic wasn't really an inversion at all.This sounds absurd to me because if this was the case it would be more accurate to say that Hegel's objective idealism isn't really idealism but a materialistic dialectic,which if true means not only that Marx didn't understand Hegel but that Hegel didn't understand Hegel.In the end I was left with the impression that Rockmore had as poor an understanding of Hegel as he had of Marx.
I was initially attracted to the book because I believed there was a difference between Marx's understanding of Hegel's dialectic and Engel's understanding of it.Marx believing that Hegel gives the absolute logical priority to being (immanence) and Engels that Hegel gives the absolute tempral priority to being (Trancendence),I was curious about whether this had any bearing on the development of what came to be known as 'Marxism'.After reading this book I was no clearer on this issue than before.I found the book to be almost a complete waste of time.

Rockmore's first move is to seperate Marx from Engels. He follows the somewhat standard argument that Engels is a philosophical weakling while Marx is a giant. Historically Engels has been considered the philosopher of the two. He does admit that Marx and Engels were in agreement about politics. Whether or not you agree with his assessment of Engels his study of Marx as a philosopher is very illuminating. Rockmore argues against one-sided materialism and argues that Marx's dialectic like Hegel's include materialism and idealism. Rockmore pays special attention to the Grundrisse to establish continuity between the 1844 Manuscripts and Capital that is between the "old" and "young" Marx.He locates Marx as the inheritor of the German idealist tradition. Rockmore is an erudite philosopher and I have gotten much from everything that I read by him. He is concerned exclusively with philosophy he doesn't really consider Marx as an active revolutionary and if you are inclined taht way you will have to think about the implications of Marx's philosophy for practice without the help of Rockmore. Occassionally Rockmore reminds us that he leans to teh left and throws in a couple of sentences denouncing extreme poverty but for the most part he remains a left liberal.Finally, Rockmore doesn't seem to find it necessary to prove his inteligence by being incomprehensible like Jameson, Zizek,and other postmodern Marxists.

The emphasis in MARX AFTER MARXISM is on Karl Marx as a philosopher, rather than as an author with a profane point of view, attempting to describe reality with due attention to political and economic aspects of life. Hegel is recognized as a philosophical giant who set the context in which thinking was being evaluated in Marx's lifetime. Tom Rockmore, with the views of a conventional philosophy professor who is an expert in this field, thinks "Marx's critical effort to deal with Hegel, in itself a wonderful example of the conceptual clash of two of the most powerful minds of the nineteenth century, commenced as soon as he began to write." (p. xv). Almost as much attention in the early part of the book is given to Engels, who collaborated with Marx on THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and other works, who claimed the ability to distinguish "between philosophy and the science of social reality." (p. 8). Marx lived a life that was close to poverty in London, and some consideration of the poor is still part of the picture in this book. "By poverty I have in mind the fact that a country like India is still unable to assure a reliable source of clean water, that in a distressing number of countries the life expectancy is still less than 60, that famine continues to occur although in fact there is enough food to prevent starvation, and so on." (p. 204). I have corrected a typographical error, "although in in fact," though someone speaking might actually utter an extra word occasionally. My favorite correction is in the last sentence of Chapter 6, "Marx the Hegelian," in which I use the word "continue" twice, and I defy anyone to guess what word appeared in place of `continue' early in this sentence: "After Hegel and certainly after Marxism, Marx's theories remain and will continue to remain relevant for as long as money is in short supply, and as long as problems intrinsic to the modern industrial world, such as poverty, differences in real opportunity between the rich and poor, and similar economic difficulties, continue to endure." (p. 205).

Nietzsche shows up late in this book, right after "Kierkegaard, who criticizes Hegel, is a right-wing Hegelian, more interested in God than man, more concerned with returning to God than with understanding man other than through God. Very much like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is interested in surpassing such ordinary boundaries as ethical rules. Unlike his Danish contemporary, Nietzsche is not concerned with people in general, but rather with exceptional human beings, those who are beyond any rules other than those of their own devising." (p. 198). This makes being a philosopher sound pretty simple, like the mindless fans who are spending the sums of money which make people successful in a thoroughly comic society, where value typically means entertainment value, as in the commercials which are constantly being run by the networks. People with jobs are increasingly irrelevant to economic concerns, as Nietzsche thought the average person would have to reduce their self to a lowly clerk to have a job, or in his case, to retain the esteem of the college professors who dominated philology in the 1870s, when Nietzsche was a college professor. As Rockmore sees it, after discussing the conception of ideology, "For Friedrich Nietzsche, we are led astray by the tendency of the views of the weak to dominate the discussion." (p. 200).

There are a number of places in this book where the unpopularity of having a job is obvious, for people who have other things to do. A theologian, David Friedrich Strauss, who had an amazing ability to come up with distinctions which became prime factors in deciding who was suitable for college professorships, is mentioned by Rockmore early in this book. The first two paragraphs on page 17 relate "a theological conflict. David F. Strauss, the author of the influential work, THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED, published in 1835-6, inferred from his reading of Hegel that the incarnation did not take place in a single person but in the entire human race." This tended to make religion primarily a concern of people, rather than doctrine, and for a group in Germany, "as the young Hegelians, consisted in spreading democratic ideas and in awakening the intellectual consciousness of Germany. Prior to Marx, who was also a young Hegelian, they were, however, unsuccessful in transforming their philosophical ideas into a political movement." (pp. 17-18). This book tries to keep up with what is going on, but as it has no means of considering the non-job economics which currently dominates the political structure of global enterprises, in which wages are the factor that is cut to a minimum in areas that might be expected to have a growing economy, the book is mainly just a summary of political economics as understood a few centuries ago.