The other side of Marx - The Earth is Round

The reverse of Marx

14/09/2024

Culture • Philosophy • Books • Marx/Engels

By TIAGO MEDEIROS ARAÚJO*

Commentary on the recently released book by José Crisóstomo de Souza

No thinker has had more influence on our time than Karl Marx. Perhaps no other thinker has been as widely discussed, celebrated and criticized as he. With a vast body of work that spans the fields of economics, sociology, history, law and political science, this eminent author has never ceased to be a philosopher first and foremost. It is about his philosophy that the publisher Ateliê de Humanidades is bringing to the Brazilian public a book written by one of his tireless and astute readers, the philosopher José Crisóstomo de Souza.

The title is true to the undertaking: The reverse of Marx is an analytical and critical exercise regarding the philosophical assumptions of Marxist thought. What involves the author's reflections The capital in the areas mentioned above, but goes further, touching on the obscure – for someone so proudly materialistic – fields of theology and mysticism. It is revelations of certain perspectives, beliefs and even creeds peculiar to Marx that provide the guidelines for this work. This review serves only to introduce a few of its various elements.

Using an unusual but, as the reader will see, quite effective methodology, the book is a sequence of six “conversations.” The method and style are carefully interwoven as if to invite the reader to a conversation and, generously, the invitation is reiterated as the narrative progresses and becomes more dense.

Having surrounded himself with an immense volume of references, in six languages, and presented and articulated them throughout the writing, especially in footnotes, José Crisóstomo de Souza does not spare the reader the academic responsibility with which he is accustomed to treating his writings, without thereby giving up the clarity, didactics and spontaneous colloquiality typical of someone who wants to make himself understood.

Anyone who knows José Crisóstomo de Souza, in fact, knows that this method and style printed in The reverse of Marx are the very substance of doing philosophy in his opinion: “a conversational practice, in which individuals deal with themes of understanding things, through terminologies of general scope, in a civil framework, always contemporary, of interactions”.

The six “philosophical conversations for a philosophy with a future” – this is the subtitle of the work – are preceded by two introductory texts that already announce the diagnosis of Marx’s work and a philosophical agenda for treating the thought contained therein. The diagnosis concerns the metaphysical character of Marx’s philosophy and the agenda is to guide its detranscendentalization.

José Crisóstomo de Souza highlights that the younger Marx lets slip at different moments that his sensitivity for the vulnerable, excluded and oppressed has a metaphysical and, ultimately, mystical background, which finds an image in the myth of humanus, poeticized in the Mysteries, by Goethe. In short, the myth announces an idea of humanity as a project of community amalgamated by the union of the true Human with the true Divine, the link between charity and love.

However, this union would not be a given, but a power, a project for the future: a conciliation presented as the “final, historical goal of all previous culture and religion”. Chrysostom insinuates that Marx, a “speculative philosopher”, was touched by the power of such an image in his youth, which is why he early outlined the direction of his work to pursue the primary objective of establishing this “unitary community”.

It was this “that this first Marx, from 1842, was able to conceive of as the human race redeemed, or called to redemption, by way of the diverse religions of the diverse peoples, all crowned in Christianity as the religion of the God-Man, of course, esoterically translated” (p. 15). It was this that awakened the vigorous humanism that Marx disguised as science with its own materialism and full of consequences, including that of the unrestricted and irreversible bet on communism.

Marx is also a virtuoso in all the areas in which he wrote, but his virtuosity is placed at the service of a “crypto-religious” commitment. Despite his scientific side and his counter-rhetoric of disqualifying adversaries as “religious”, José Crisóstomo de Souza exposes how the horizon present in the myth of Humans would make Marx engage with an immanentist, historical teleology, which includes a secularized social-Christian morality. This can be glimpsed in the pages of Inside out in what sense is it relevant to recognize the relevance of Marx, for better or for worse, outside of his traditional pedestal, now “detranscendentalized”. Put more succinctly, Chrysostom detranscendentalizes a Marx who prided himself on having made Christianity social, material.

The first “conversation” in the book involves the themes of Christianity, man and his essence, in materialism, through the reconstruction of a direct dialogue between Karl Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s sensualist empiricism is, as José Crisóstomo de Souza shows, unfairly criticized by Marx as an insufficiently materialist and inadvertently individualist point of view, which would be a hasty blow given by the philosopher to a thinker who attributes to the being of man an elementary relational formula in the constitutive bond “I-thou”.

Doing justice to the author of The Essence of Christianity, and bringing Marx to a level where he appears in horizontal contact with those he criticizes, José Crisóstomo de Souza uses inspired passages, such as this one: “If, according to Feuerbach, one can still say in some way that individuals 'have' relations, in Marx the relations [social, class) 'have' the individuals, who are 'placed' by them, that is, by the material circumstances and by history” (p. 71).

For Marx, José Crisóstomo de Souza shows us, Feuerbach's generic being would need to be unraveled by what shapes the human, that is, the set of material social relations of which it is made. From the detailed exercise of reading and commentary applied to Theses on Feuerbach, in the course of the “first conversation”, we are led to conclude both about what Marx’s real qualities are, the defense of a practical-sensitive materialism, and about the weaknesses that tarnished all his later work and that would be taken, nolens volens, as virtue, by epigones of his thought and his politics: transcendentalism, necessitarianism, determinism, etc.

If the first conversation is dedicated to analyzing the dialogue between Marx and Feuerbach, the second goes to the philosophical matrix of everything: Hegel. The debate here is about the notions of substance and self-consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity. José Crisóstomo de Souza explores Marx's reading of Hegel and Hegel's reading of Spinoza, to show that the horizon of Marxian historical materialism is largely seen through the polished lenses of Spinozist substantialism, that of a “primacy of external nature” (p. 106).

But not only that. In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx recognizes that the Hegelian system makes the State the substantive manifestation of Man, which for him is a prediction, as well as a falsification. Although Hegel was much less narrowly oriented to a defined political regime, given the polysemy of his work, as Friedrich Engels attests in the rich Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and as Chrysostom recognizes, both in his previous books and in the second conversation of Inside out, Marx attacks a supposedly irreversible substantiality of the State to, through negation, propose its antithesis, as destruction.

The substance of the true human being would not be in the complex of institutions (State) and current relations of production (economy), it would be in his Future. And his future is where History will take him: to Communism, without the State. It is not a question of “if”, but of “when”; it is not a question of philosophy, but of science.

In yet another inspired passage, José Crisóstomo de Souza concludes: “[the communist, human-communitarian consciousness] would be substantial, historically legitimized, solidly supported by the negativity of the Substance itself, which it simply expresses, and, finally, it is not philosophical, but scientific. ‘It arises by [historical] necessity, when the productive forces, within the framework of the current relations [of production], become destructive forces’. It arises in the quality of consciousness of the absolutely necessary character of the Revolution, and has the necessary character of the latter” (p. 123).

These two are the most conventional and superbly philosophical “conversations,” since the others deal more openly with cultural themes and allow themselves to be contaminated by them. The “third conversation” explores the theme of the foundation of the intellectual enterprise of criticism, and this foundation as man. A certain philosophical anthropology inspired by Feuerbach and a philosophy of history influenced by Hegel provide the fuel for Marx to advance a teleological thesis, aimed at the realization of the communal essence of Man.

In a sophisticated movement of comings and goings between works from different phases, José Crisóstomo de Souza shows what changes and what remains throughout Marx's career, in which the normative objective of implementing communism is the touchstone, its unequivocal meaning for the entire Marxian work as unequivocal: “We can understand, therefore, that Marx's communism is finally the establishment of man (of the ideal man or of the communist ideal of man), that is, of the fully social, communal man, who will be the result and crowning of history” (p. 133).

Little by little, we are beginning to see the scenario outlined by the Marxist legacy in contemporary Western culture, especially with regard to the public debate, often only social-democratic, of the left. This is when materialism becomes morality, and politics, religion. José Crisóstomo de Souza reveals how this deception, which triggered the identitarian wave and its antagonistic correlate, the reactionary culture wars, was already contained – as a farce – in Marx.

In his “fourth conversation,” the author from Minas Gerais and Bahia dedicates several paragraphs to Friedrich Engels’ reading of Feuerbach, but all to arrive at the corollary that, in the eyes of the duo Marx & Engels, morality only becomes concrete – post-Feuerbachian and post-Kantian – with the materialist conception of history, since the script of apodictic postulates and the apocalyptic contours of the discourse create the insurmountable cleavage of capitalism as evil and communism as good. And this cleavage is the essence of a politics practiced as faith: “with the materialist conception of history, we have something practical, a ‘political religion,’ or a ‘religious politics,’ we have the politics of realizing the ideal, of communism – of a ‘kingdom of god on earth,’ if you will” (p. 165).

By way of an excursus, as José Crisóstomo de Souza shares when, in the first sections, he pauses the narrative to contextualize his own intellectual journey and fits the book into a broader trajectory, the “fifth conversation” is a synthetic and encyclopedic, yet equally critical, exploration of the notion of “transpersonal body”.

The theme is permeated by religious and eschatological images and, before Marx, it was developed by Rousseau and Hobbes: in one, as “general will”, in the other, the person who is at the same time “man” and “god” (artificial). But in Marx, the claim to objectivity is always more symptomatic – even polishing the dream of a São Paulo without religious dualism (p.206). This objectivity is finally translated into the overcoming of the State itself; the transpersonal body, a political body, of which José Crisóstomo de Souza speaks when unraveling Marx, is that of humanity that imposes upon itself the independence of this transitory form of institutionality, the State.

In all the “conversations” and in their internal sections, what is most valuable in the book are, however, the author’s own theses, which emerge forcefully, but economically, gradually. José Crisóstomo de Souza does not hide what he learned from Marx and what he inherited from him, and advances a philosophical agenda that Marx did not invest in, but did not ignore.

For that very reason, O Inside out is also a great compliment to the author of The capital. And not exactly because The capital, but by insights dispersed and abandoned by Marx throughout his work. The thesis that reality is a sensitive activity, which José Crisóstomo de Souza came to develop in his sophisticated A World of Our Own, was a light that Marx shed on contemporary philosophy, in terms that not even pragmatism, according to Chrysostom, managed to do so with the same effectiveness and finish. The task of detranscendentalizing Marx, of emancipating him from his mystical, metaphysical, eschatological, apocalyptic slime, is to take another Marx more seriously, a Marx that Marx himself tried to “override” in the dialectic of his career.

In conclusion, I must state that The reverse of Marx It is also, tacitly, a work about the state of literate culture in Brazil in our time, about what it has been, about what it can become, and about its relationship with politics and with the disciplines of power, such as economics and law. It is about all of this, because it is about the epistemological and normative foundations on which we, heirs of Marx's century, the 20th century, navigate.

The institutions and practices of this world, under the Marxist imaginary, have sort of taken the figure of the proletariat as an identity before la lettre, and the “fragmentary” and “oppressed” identities as the bearers of Good, violated by structures that are, in essence, capitalist, or, as the author ironically puts it, “capitalist”. Also the deconstructionist sensibility, a glamorous and inconsequential fashion of the intellectual elite and left-wing parties, is an offshoot of Marx’s “negationist criticism”. We learn about this in the last “conversation” of the book, when the author outlines the antagonistic agenda to this Marxian “speculative heritage” and states in detail his differences with Marx and Marxism, offering his poetic-pragmatic materialism.

I will stop here, with the hope that this introduction to a rich and enjoyable sequence of conversations may precipitate the reader into the same deciphering of Marx that I allowed myself when reading him, then, from the back.

*Tiago Medeiros Araujo is a professor of philosophy at the Federal Institute of Bahia.

Reference

Jose Crisostomo de Souza. The Other Side of Marx: Philosophical Conversations for a Philosophy with a Future. Humanities Workshop, 2024, 276 pages. [https://amzn.to/3XGbMUn]