Marx has a profound analysis of capitalism, with sharp insights into modernity, yet Marx, and Marxism, have a fatal blindspot in historical analysis - the role of religion, and ultimately Marxism fails to transcend the categories of capitalism necessary for its critique.
Furthermore, Marx retained “modern natural law” as well as the “modern secular order.”
Marxism, thus, turns out to be a mode of liberalism.
Veroufakis, in his article HERE, is perfectly right that the Communist Manifesto is a liberal text - which is exactly why it fails adequately to criticise capitalism or adequately to be socialist, thus Marxists promotes the myth that the rationalism of capitalism will ensure the eventual collapse of its contradictory irrational element.
Of course, instead of an ethical and spiritual critique of capitalism as destruction of sacred value, Marx celebrates the destruction and promotes the myth that the rationalism of capitalism will ensure the eventual collapse of its contradictory irrational element, but Marx's notions of the rational/irrational are nominalistic, contra any Greek/Latin/Christian understanding.
In the end, Marx was not materialistic enough, one can propose poesis as opposed to praxis, that in making we make ourselves, we self-create through labour.
But then, unlike Ruskin, neither Marx nor Hegel realized capitalism is the logical managment of the death of the belief that one can discover through art and practice the ‘proper end’ of things, particularly in labor by integrating poesis with ethical praxis, thus only in the invocation of transcendence can there be a critique of capitalist order, whose ‘secularity’ is its primary character.
Briefly, I sum up John Milbank's useful metacritique of Marxist critique:
1 Marx takes over from Feuerbach an account of projection which assumes that all human reality derives from a self-positing ego.
2 He cannot show why religion should occur as an epiphenomenon.
3 He exposes cultural processes as themselves ‘religious’, but can only contrast these with an imaginary, naturalistic norm, a new ‘natural law’of humanity.
4 Historical religions, like Christianity, can only be shown to be illusory, if they are represented as departures from an impossible pre-cultural humanity, or else as necessary stages on the way to an impossible post-cultural humanity, where peace and freedom emerge ‘spontaneously’ with the mere negative abolition of what is holding them back.
5 Christianity is only criticized by ‘situating’ it within a metanarrative which has itself a quasi-religious and ‘heterodox’ character.
Marx *imagines the secular was lurking behind the mask of sacrality, ready to be revealed once religious illusions were stripped away.... but this "secular space" had to be imagined, instituted and constructed.
Theorists like Marx imagined the secular as a “natural” sphere of sheer power, where egotistical self-interest reigns, free of the “artificial” constraints of religion and morality.
However, such a thing never appears in *actual history. For example, in the medieval town, guilds and corporations were inspired by and infused with Christianity. Political life was imbued with religious norms, symbols, and rituals. Through mechanisms like the just price, economics was molded toward charity. In this setting, “the social” isn’t a separable, or even a distinguishable, factor. Neither is religion: medieval religion is always already social, even as medieval society is always already religion. The more a social order exists “inside” religion, the less one is capable of isolating social factors in order to explain religion.
Just one example, Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars, shows in historical detail how the traditional religion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries actually did form a very strong social bond. The sacraments of the Church brought about the interweaving of the sacred and the social that is the lived reality of sacred tradition. Duffy insists on “the social homogeneity of late medieval religion.” As he demonstrates: “Rich and poor, simple and sophisticate could kneel side by side, using the same prayers and sharing the same hopes.” In spite of the differences of sophistication about the faith, “they did not have a different religion.”
The social bond of medieval Europe was not found in an idea, or theory, but in worship, in the Eucharist.
Marx considers all religions to occupy the realm of mere belief, ignoring the dimension of religious practice.
But in in all anthropological studies one simply cannot recognize a separate economic function at all, acts of production and exchange are always regarded as part of a religious ritual.
There is nothing purely “social” that can be isolated from the complex of cultural, political and religious realities - there’s no “social” to which something else might be reduced.
No “religion” or culture can be operated from "nature".
There does not exist a “pre-religious”, “natural” state of existence (“pre-cultural humanity”) so Marx ends up reifying the political economic conception of “human nature”, he thinks capitalism actually reveals the “true nature” of economics, and man !
Marx, therefore, does not recognize the historically contingent character of economics - rather he posits an ahistorical fictional essence of man outside all culture and all history.
In the face of all the evidence (and there is vastly more such evidence, in virtually every tribal society every studied), sociologists continue to treat “society” as an independent, fundamental, explanatory variable and social factors considered more fundamental than religion - this is a myth.
Ironically, Marxists themselves espouse the “liberal protestant metanarrative,”an account of universal history that traces stages in religious development – from myth and magic through the salvation religions to modern privatized religion of ethics and humanitarianism.
Rather than seeing the development of Western Christianity from patristic to medieval to modern as a series of contingent modifications within Christian ethos and doctrine, being blind to the ubiquitous religious factors, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch elevated this history into a metanarrative, a gradual unveiling of what was latent in Christianity all along, even as the unveiling of the universal truth of religion itself.
But this universalizes a particular and contingent history.
“Progress,” the story goes, lies in the direction of the privatization of religion, individualism, anti-ritualism. Armed with this narrative, sociology guards the supposed neutrality of liberal order from every substantive overarching purpose and goal.
Sociology thereby defends the secular order it helps to constitute and claims to study.
However, such a thing never appears in *actual history. For example, in the medieval town, guilds and corporations were inspired by and infused with Christianity. Political life was imbued with religious norms, symbols, and rituals. Through mechanisms like the just price, economics was molded toward charity. In this setting, “the social” isn’t a separable, or even a distinguishable, factor. Neither is religion: medieval religion is always already social, even as medieval society is always already religion. The more a social order exists “inside” religion, the less one is capable of isolating social factors in order to explain religion.
Just one example, Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars, shows in historical detail how the traditional religion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries actually did form a very strong social bond. The sacraments of the Church brought about the interweaving of the sacred and the social that is the lived reality of sacred tradition. Duffy insists on “the social homogeneity of late medieval religion.” As he demonstrates: “Rich and poor, simple and sophisticate could kneel side by side, using the same prayers and sharing the same hopes.” In spite of the differences of sophistication about the faith, “they did not have a different religion.”
The social bond of medieval Europe was not found in an idea, or theory, but in worship, in the Eucharist.
Marx considers all religions to occupy the realm of mere belief, ignoring the dimension of religious practice.
But in in all anthropological studies one simply cannot recognize a separate economic function at all, acts of production and exchange are always regarded as part of a religious ritual.
There is nothing purely “social” that can be isolated from the complex of cultural, political and religious realities - there’s no “social” to which something else might be reduced.
No “religion” or culture can be operated from "nature".
There does not exist a “pre-religious”, “natural” state of existence (“pre-cultural humanity”) so Marx ends up reifying the political economic conception of “human nature”, he thinks capitalism actually reveals the “true nature” of economics, and man !
Marx, therefore, does not recognize the historically contingent character of economics - rather he posits an ahistorical fictional essence of man outside all culture and all history.
In the face of all the evidence (and there is vastly more such evidence, in virtually every tribal society every studied), sociologists continue to treat “society” as an independent, fundamental, explanatory variable and social factors considered more fundamental than religion - this is a myth.
Rather than seeing the development of Western Christianity from patristic to medieval to modern as a series of contingent modifications within Christian ethos and doctrine, being blind to the ubiquitous religious factors, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch elevated this history into a metanarrative, a gradual unveiling of what was latent in Christianity all along, even as the unveiling of the universal truth of religion itself.
But this universalizes a particular and contingent history.
“Progress,” the story goes, lies in the direction of the privatization of religion, individualism, anti-ritualism. Armed with this narrative, sociology guards the supposed neutrality of liberal order from every substantive overarching purpose and goal.
Sociology thereby defends the secular order it helps to constitute and claims to study.
Furthermore, Marx retained “modern natural law” as well as the “modern secular order.”
Marxism, thus, turns out to be a mode of liberalism.
Veroufakis, in his article HERE, is perfectly right that the Communist Manifesto is a liberal text - which is exactly why it fails adequately to criticise capitalism or adequately to be socialist, thus Marxists promotes the myth that the rationalism of capitalism will ensure the eventual collapse of its contradictory irrational element.
Of course, instead of an ethical and spiritual critique of capitalism as destruction of sacred value, Marx celebrates the destruction and promotes the myth that the rationalism of capitalism will ensure the eventual collapse of its contradictory irrational element, but Marx's notions of the rational/irrational are nominalistic, contra any Greek/Latin/Christian understanding.
In the end, Marx was not materialistic enough, one can propose poesis as opposed to praxis, that in making we make ourselves, we self-create through labour.
But then, unlike Ruskin, neither Marx nor Hegel realized capitalism is the logical managment of the death of the belief that one can discover through art and practice the ‘proper end’ of things, particularly in labor by integrating poesis with ethical praxis, thus only in the invocation of transcendence can there be a critique of capitalist order, whose ‘secularity’ is its primary character.
Briefly, I sum up John Milbank's useful metacritique of Marxist critique:
1 Marx takes over from Feuerbach an account of projection which assumes that all human reality derives from a self-positing ego.
2 He cannot show why religion should occur as an epiphenomenon.
3 He exposes cultural processes as themselves ‘religious’, but can only contrast these with an imaginary, naturalistic norm, a new ‘natural law’of humanity.
4 Historical religions, like Christianity, can only be shown to be illusory, if they are represented as departures from an impossible pre-cultural humanity, or else as necessary stages on the way to an impossible post-cultural humanity, where peace and freedom emerge ‘spontaneously’ with the mere negative abolition of what is holding them back.
5 Christianity is only criticized by ‘situating’ it within a metanarrative which has itself a quasi-religious and ‘heterodox’ character.
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