“The greatness of Hegel’s phenomenology and its end result-the dialectic of negativity as motive and productive principle-is thus … that Hegel grasps the self-generation of man as a process, objectification as de-objectification, as alienation and the overcoming of this alienation; in other words, that he grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man, who is true man because of his reality, as the result of his own labour. [Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General]”
“The idea of self-constitution of the species through labour is to serve as the guide to appropriating the Phenomenology while demythologising it.”
“Marx reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumental action.”
“By reducing the self-positing of the absolute ego to the more tangible productive activity of the species, be eliminates reflection as such as a motive force of history, even though be retains the framework of the philosophy of reflection.”
“His re-interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology betrays the paradoxical consequences of taking Fichte’s philosophy of the ego and undermining it with materialism.”
“Marx conceives of reflection according to the model of production. Because he tacitly starts with this premise, it is not inconsistent that he does not distinguish between the logical status of the natural sciences and of critique.”
“With regard to the epistemological justification of the natural sciences, Marx stands with Kant against Hegel, although he does not identify them with knowledge as such. For Marx as for Kant the criterion of what makes science scientific is methodically guaranteed cognitive progress. Yet Marx did not simply assume this progress as evident. Instead, he measured it in relation to the degree to which natural-scientific information, regarded as in essence technically exploitable knowledge, enters the process of production:”
“The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and appropriated an ever growing body of material. Philosophy has remained just as foreign to them as they remained foreign to philosophy. Their momentary union [criticising Schelling and Hegel] was only a fantastic illusion … In a much more practical fashion, natural science has intervened in human life and transformed it by means of industry … Industry is the real historical relation of nature, and thus of natural science, to man. [Marx, Private Property & Communism,]”
“He considered unnecessary an epistemological justification of social theory.”
“If we take as our basis the materialist concept of synthesis through social labour, then both the technically exploitable knowledge of the natural sciences, the knowledge of natural laws, as well as the theory of society, the knowledge of laws of human natural history, belong to the same objective context of the self-constitution of the species.”
“From the level of pragmatic, everyday knowledge to modern natural science, the knowledge of nature derives from man’s primary coming to grips with nature; at the same time it reacts back upon the system of social labour and stimulates its development.”
“The knowledge of society can be viewed analogously. Extending from the level of the pragmatic self-understanding of social groups to actual social theory, it defines the self-consciousness of societal subjects. Their identity is reformed at each stage of development of the productive forces and is in turn a condition for steering the process of production:”
“So far as production establishes the only framework in which the genesis and function of knowledge can be interpreted, the science of man also appears under categories of knowledge for control.”
“At the level of the self-consciousness of social subjects, knowledge that makes possible the control of natural processes turns into knowledge that makes possible the control of the social life process.”
“In the dimension of labour as a process of production and appropriation, reflective knowledge changes into productive knowledge. Natural knowledge congealed in technologies impels the social subject to an ever more thorough knowledge of its “Process of material exchange” with nature.”
“In the end this knowledge is transformed into the steering of social processes in a manner not unlike that in which natural science becomes the power of technical control.”
“In the preliminary studies for the Critique of Political Economy there is a model according to which the history of the species is linked to an automatic transposition of natural science and technology into a self-consciousness of the social subject (general intellect)-a consciousness that controls the material life process.”
“According to this construction the history of transcendental consciousness would be no more than the residue of the history of technology.”
“The epochal turning-points in the evolution of technology show how all capacities of the human organism combined in the behavioural system of instrumental action are gradually transferred to the means of labour: First the capacities of the executing organs, then those of the sense organs, the energy production of the human organism, and finally the capacities of the controlling organ, the brain.”
“The stages of technical progress can in principle be foreseen. In the end the entire labour process will have separated itself from man and reside only in the means of labour.”
“The self-generative act of the human species is complete as soon as the social subject has emancipated itself from necessary labour and, so to speak, takes its place alongside scientised production.”
“the compulsion to labour will be broken. The social subject (as ego) will have permeated and appropriated the nature objectified through labour (the non-ego), as much as is conceivable under the conditions of production (the activity of the “absolute ego”).”
“Along with the materialist interpretation of his theory of knowledge, Fichte’s thought has been translated into a Saint-Simonian perspective.”
“An unusual passage from the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie, which does not recur in the parallel investigations in Capital, fits into this framework:
To the degree … that large-scale industry develops, the creation of social wealth depends less on labour time and the quantity of labour expended than on the power of the instruments that are set in motion during labour time and which themselves in turn-their powerful effectiveness-themselves in turn are in no proportion to the immediate labour time that their production costs. Rather they depend on the general level of science and technological progress, or the application of science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others along with it, is itself in turn proportional to the development of material production.) For example, agriculture becomes the mere application of the science of material exchange as it is to be regulated most advantageously for the entire social body. Real wealth manifests itself rather-and large industry reveals this-in the tremendous disproportion between the labour time expended and its product just as in the qualitative disproportion between labour that bad been reduced to a pure abstraction and the power of the productive process that it oversees. As man relates to the process of production as overseer and regulator, labour no longer seems so much to be enclosed within the process of production. (What holds for machinery holds just as well for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) The labourer no longer inserts a modified natural object between the object and himself. Instead he inserts the natural process that he has transformed into an industrial one as a medium between himself and inorganic nature, of which he takes command. He takes his place alongside the process of production instead of being its chief agent. In this transformation what appears as the keystone of production and wealth is neither the immediate labour performed by man himself nor the time he labours but the appropriation of his own general productive force, his understanding of nature and its mastery through his societal existence-in a word, the development of the social individual….”
“Here it is from the methodological perspective that we are interested in this conception of the transformation of the labour process into a scientific process that would bring man’s “material exchange” with nature under the control of a human species totally emancipated from necessary labour.”
“As long as we regard the self-constitution of the species through labour only with respect to the power of control over natural processes that accumulates in the forces of production, it is meaningful to speak of the social system in general and to speak of the social subject in the singular.”
“For the level of development of the forces of production determines the system of social labour as a whole.”
“In principle the members of a society all live at the same level of mastery of nature, which in each case is given with the available technical knowledge. So far as the identity of a society takes form via this level of scientific-technical progress, it is the self-consciousness of “the” social subject.”
“The mystery of the commodity form, therefore, is simply that it takes the social characteristics of men’s own labour and reflects them back to men as the objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the social natural properties of these things.”
“fetishising the true social relations. Thus, according to Marx, the distinguishing feature of capitalism is that it has brought ideologies from the heights of mythological or religious legitimations of tangible domination and power down into the system of social labour.”
“In liberal bourgeois society the legitimation of power is derived from the legitimation of the market, that is from the “justice” of the exchange of equivalents inherent in exchange relations. It is unmasked by the critique of commodity fetishism.”
“For Marx, the phenomenological exposition of consciousness in its manifestations, which served Hegel only as an introduction to scientific knowledge, becomes the frame of reference in which the analysis of the history of the species stays confined.”
“The science of man itself Jr is critique and must remain so. For after arriving at the concept of synthesis through a reconstruction of the course of consciousness in its manifestations, there is only one condition under which critical consciousness could adopt a perspective that allowed disengaging social theory from the -epistemological mediation of phenomenological self-reflection: that is if critical consciousness could apprehend and understand itself as absolute synthesis.”
“As it is, however, social theory remains embedded in the framework of phenomenology, while the latter, under materialist presuppositions, assumes the form of the critique of ideology.”
“If Marx bad reflected on the methodological presuppositions of social theory as he sketched it out and not overlaid it with a philosophical self-understanding restricted to the categorical framework of production, the difference between rigorous empirical science and critique would not have been concealed.”
“If Marx had not thrown together interaction and work under the label of social practice (Praxis), and had he instead related the materialist concept of synthesis likewise to the accomplishments of instrumental action and the nexuses of communicative action, then the idea of a science of man would not have been obscured by identification with natural science.”
“Rather, this idea would have taken up Hegel’s critique of the subjectivism of Kant’s epistemology and surpassed it materialistically. It would have made clear that ultimately a radical critique of knowledge can be carried out only in the form of a reconstruction of the history of the species, and that conversely social theory, from the viewpoint of the self-constitution of the species in the medium of social labour and class struggle, is possible only as the self-reflection of the knowing subject.”
“On this foundation philosophy’s position with regard to science could have been explicitly clarified.”
“Philosophy is preserved in science as critique.”
“A social theory that puts forth the claim to be a self-reflection of the history of the species cannot simply negate philosophy. Rather, the heritage of philosophy issues in the critique of ideology, a mode of thought that determines the method of scientific analysis itself.”
“Outside of critique, however, philosophy retains no rights. To the degree that the science of man is a material critique of knowledge, philosophy, which as pure epistemology robbed itself of all content, indirectly regains its access to material problems.”
“As philosophy, however, the universal scientific knowledge that philosophy wanted to be succumbs to the annihilating judgment of critique.””
“Marx did not develop this idea of the science of man. By equating critique with natural science, he disavowed it. Materialist scientism only reconfirms what absolute idealism had already accomplished: ‘the elimination of epistemology in favour of unchained universal “scientific knowledge” - but this time of scientific materialism instead of absolute knowledge.”
“With his positivist demand for a natural science of the social, Comte merely needed to take Marx, or at least the intention that Marx believed himself to be pursuing, at his word. Positivism turned its back to the theory of knowledge, whose philosophical self-liquidation had been carried on by Hegel and Marx, who were of one mind in this regard. In so doing, positivism regressed behind the level of reflection once attained by Kant.”
“In continuity with pre-critical traditions, however, it successfully set about the task, which epistemology had abandoned and from which Hegel and Marx believed themselves exempted, of elaborating a methodology of the sciences.”