From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology

204 Pages·1999·4.487 MB·English

by  Jonathan E. Pike

FROM ARISTOTLE TO MARX

From Aristotle to Marx
Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology
JONATHAN E. PIKE
The Open University
First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright © Jonathan E. Pike 1999
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 The Crisis of Marxism and Marx Interpretation 1
2 Marxism and Social Ontology 8
3 Snapping the Bonds: Marx and Antiquity 21
in the Early Writings
4 The Aristotelian Tradition in Ontology 31
5 Neo-Aristotelianism: Prospects for Social Theory 55
6 Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and its 71
Ontological Implications
7 The Demands of Marx’s Critique 89
8 Marx and the Concept of Decay 112
9 Marxism and Methodological Individualism 136
10 Marxism and Totality: Lukäcs’s Social Ontology 160
Glossary 186
Bibliography 188
Index 194
V

Acknowledgements
This study was undertaken in the congenial environment of the
Philosophy Department at Glasgow University. Financial support for
the research came from two sources; I am grateful to the Economic and
Social Research Council for funding a year's research for an M.Phil. at
Glasgow, during which the material was first investigated. Later, the
Social Sciences Faculty at Glasgow University funded two further years
of research for a PhD through the award of a post graduate scholarship.
I was supervised by Scott Meikle, whose intellectual guidance was
invaluable.
An earlier version of chapter seven was presented to the Annual
conference of the Political Studies Association, at Queens' University
Belfast in 1992 and to the West Coast Socialist Scholars conference at
UCLA in 1993. An earlier version of chapter four was presented to the
Marxism Specialism Group of the PSA at Leeds in 1994. An earlier
version of chapter three has been published in the journal Critique.
Political philosophy is a social activity, and I am grateful to many
students in political theory and philosophy at Glasgow University, and
at Stirling University, who have contributed to the development of some
of the arguments here.
The whole manuscript was read by Scott Meikle, Pat Shaw, David
McLellan, Stephen McLeod and Gillian Ure. Hillel Ticktin and Brian
McKenna read chapters. All made improving suggestions, and the
remaining mistakes are down to me. Without the support of Gillian
Ure, the project would have foundered. Finally, my thanks to my
parents for their encouragement of this book. It is for them.
Vll

1 The Crisis of Marxism and
Marx Interpretation
The crisis of Marxism as an intellectual and political project has been
brought to a head by the collapse of the regimes in Russia and Eastern
Europe. These events were overwhelmingly interpreted as entailing the
end of the significance not only of ‘Communism’ but also of Marx’s
thought. So it may seem odd, or just a retracing of old ground, to go back
to Marx and seek to offer another interpretation of his thought and his
system. One motivation for attempting such a task is a nagging unease at
the weaving of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rulers of the Soviet Union
into a more or less continuous thread. So one reason for looking at, and
thinking about, Marx’s writings in a specifically philosophical way is to
see whether it is possible to disentangle Marx from the actions carried out
in his name. This does not involve simply posing nineteenth century texts
against twentieth century reality: the Marx corpus admits of a huge range
of quotation mongering, and Soviet disputes were continually carried out
under the cloak of gestures towards his written authority. More important
is to ask whether Marx could have accepted the sort of ‘spin’ put on his
work by the theorists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Possibility is a tricky modality, and assessing what Marx could and could
not have done involves looking at some of the hidden structures of Marx’s
thought and system to establish the limits that such structures placed on
what he could and could not have argued.
This is not to say that it is only as a result of philosophical
misunderstandings that soi disant Marxists established and maintained
some of the most brutal and inhuman regimes in human history. The task
is not to relieve Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao of their responsibility for the
many millions of deaths that they directly and indirectly caused, by
suggesting that if they had only understood Marx’s conception of
contradiction, or whatever, then they would have behaved differently. The
relationship between theory and practice is nothing like that close. Rather
the task is to see whether or not Marx’s writings are implicated in their
actions; it will become clear in the course of this work that I hold that such
a connection cannot be sustained.