Where in Marx do you find claims like reality is a middle-class fiction or all value is subjective? The labor theory of value is premised on an idea of surplus value as a very real thing. Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?
I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.
But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.
This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed.
> Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?
You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that this was a statement about historical inevitability (like manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was "good".
But many people have taken this to be a contradiction. Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his condemnation of people's behaviors [0].
Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7. The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective, but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative to the society in question".
Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase these ideas by saying that reality and morality are "socially constructed."
> But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island
This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving the interests of the middle class.
I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of life.
Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the romantics have generally been a conservative counter culture wanting to return to a simpler time.
I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large (morality it is easier to see the argument) but I admit it has been years since my reading. I agree with you that there is a strand in Western thought which is infatuated with science/engineering to a historically novel degree but I am not so sure that enlightenment ideals fit so neatly in the same box, or that statements like "Western thought is firmly X" can be meaningfully interpreted. In any case thanks for your response and for the link, I look forward to reading and learning from it.
> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large
The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.
To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.
> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?
Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related.
Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history.
To quote Bertrand Russell:
> His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.
Historical materialism is an idea that social constructs are formed by (obviously) material factors like economics and technology as opposed to historical voluntarism. The dialectical part is that economics and technology in their turn are created by society on the previous iteration of the historical process, but this part isn't much of a discovery. As a result everything is fundamentally matter.
I am glad for our (rather dismissive) interlocutor's comment, because I can now ask you: do you see this in any tension with Marx as an early constructivist? Social construction as I think of it is hardly compatible with a teleological cosmology. What am I missing?
Another quibble: I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter; rather his sense of the natural (like that of many of his contemporaries) had an element of what we might call the supernatural, located in a certain directedness or inevitability.
I guess where you see Marx as an early advocate of modern relativisms, I read him as deeply bound up in positivisms pervasive at the time. Maybe these are not contradictory positions. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Marx in general wasn't self-consistent. That's part of why he wasn't taken seriously as a philosopher or economist until the Soviets evangelized for him as a sort of patron saint.
But you're right to raise the question. A closely related question is: "If Marx thought the revolution was inevitable, then why did he feel the need to advocate for it?". You can also ask this about any sort of prophecy: manifest destiny, the second coming of Jesus, the singularity, etc. There's of course a literature on this, e.g. [0].
But people do in fact hold both views simultaneously. A famous example is Karl Rove, unintentionally echoing Marx's ideas:
> We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
In other words, we construct reality and it's inevitable that we construct reality. Both historical inevitability and social construction in the same thought.
> I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter
I doubt he did either, but it's supernatural in the literal sense. It's not entailed by the collection of physical laws. In fact his theory is empirically false, but even if it wasn't, the existence of a causal force in history requires an additional assumption outside of natural science. Whereas other authors had previously talked metaphorically of a spirit of force in history (e.g. the invisible hand) Marx tried to turn it into a real force the way the ancients thought of gods intervening in human affairs.
> One must have a very warped understanding of Marx
Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded word/concept.
OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of one of his main influences seems rather more in the dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.
Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency to change his mind over time, you could argue he had merely the first in a long lineage of warped understandings of himself.
Friend, if you're trying to convert people to your point of view, neither is yours. Cheers from someone with at least a few somewhat similar political sympathies.
I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.
But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.