Karl Marx

German philosopher, economist, and political theorist (1818–1883); co-author with Friedrich Engels of The Communist Manifesto (1848); author of Capital (Vol. I 1867), the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (published 1932), The German Ideology (1845–46, published 1932), The Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), The Class Struggles in France (1850), and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). For this wiki, Marx is the thinker Merleau-Ponty engages continuously from Phenomenology of Perception's famous footnote on historical materialism (1945) through Humanism and Terror (1947), *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955), and the Introduction to *Signs* (1960).

Key Points

  • The young Marx / the older Marx: MP treats these as two phases of Marx's thought that are not identical. The "young Marx" of the 1844 Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach is the philosopher who wants to "destroy philosophy by realizing it" — whose dialectic is inspired, concrete, and anti-positivist. The "older Marx" of Capital is the author of "scientific socialism" — whose dialectic has been transferred to the object of history and who has surrendered the philosophical spirit of the young Marx to naturalism. MP's sympathies are with the young Marx.
  • Marx on capital: Capital is "not a thing, but a social relationship between persons mediated by things" (Capital I.731). This formula is one of MP's most-cited Marx passages; he reads it as the seed of the interworld thesis.
  • Relations mediated by things: the idea that history is neither a relation between free subjects nor a play of objective forces, but a structured field of persons-through-things. MP takes this to be Marx's structural insight, whether or not Marx himself carried it through.
  • The realization and destruction of philosophy: Marx's program in the Theses on Feuerbach — "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" (Thesis 11) — is read by MP as the original formulation of the problem that Lukács, Lenin, and Sartre all fail to solve.
  • Alienation and the humanism of the 1844 Manuscripts: MP engages the 1844 Manuscripts in Humanism and Terror and continues to read Marx as providing the "humanism in extension" (the recognition in each person of "a power more precious than his products") against which Western liberal humanism can be measured.
  • The Marxist dialectic: MP's consistent diagnosis is that Marx inherited the Hegelian dialectic and tried to materialize it — but that this materialization produced an unresolved tension between a dialectical (subject-object circulation) and a realist (dialectic-in-the-object) Marxism.

Details

MP's Engagement with Marx

MP engages Marx at three principal moments:

1. Phenomenology of Perception (1945): Marx figures in the long historical-materialism footnote (PhP Part Three Ch III) where MP develops conditioned-freedom. The "class before class consciousness" argument is explicitly Marxist: I am a worker before I decide to be one; my class situation is not my choice, but my relation to that situation involves me as a free subject. This is MP's 1945 formulation of the conditioned freedom that treats the young Marx's humanism as the political cognate of his own ontology.

2. Humanism and Terror (1947) and humanism-in-extension: Marx is the source of the "humanism in extension" — the recognition in each person of "a power more precious than his products." MP treats Marxism as "the only philosophy that dares to develop its consequences" (1947 reprieve). The dialectic is not yet criticized; Marx's philosophy of history is accepted as the horizon of political thought, even if the Soviet regime is criticized for departing from it.

3. Adventures of the Dialectic (1955): this is MP's most sustained critical engagement with Marx. The central thesis is that Marx's "scientific socialism" and his "philosophy of praxis" are in unresolved tension — the older Marx naturalizes the dialectic in a way the younger Marx's Theses on Feuerbach would refuse. The book traces this tension through its four post-Marx phases (Lukács, Lenin, Trotsky, Sartre) and concludes that Marx's unresolved tension has no historical solution. By the Epilogue, MP has abandoned the 1947 Marxist reprieve.

4. Signs Introduction (1960): Marx is re-read as "a classic." Marxism retains philosophical weight but as an "advent" rather than a dogma. The reading is continuous with the 1955 position but less polemical.

The Young Marx

MP's engagement with the young Marx centers on three texts:

  • The Theses on Feuerbach (1845): "The question of the reality or non-reality of thinking isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question" (Thesis 2). "Philosophers have only interpreted the world... the point is to change it" (Thesis 11). "The standpoint of the old materialism is 'civil society'; the standpoint of the new is human society" (Thesis 10). MP treats these as the charter of a dialectical-practical philosophy that the older Marx does not fulfill.
  • The 1844 Manuscripts: the analysis of alienation, the humanism of species-being, the critique of political economy from the standpoint of the laboring body. MP reads the 1844 Manuscripts as philosophically more generative than Capital.
  • The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843): the formulation of the proletariat as "a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes." MP treats this as the formulation of the proletariat-as-Selbstaufhebung that Lukács inherits and develops.

The Older Marx

MP's treatment of the older Marx is more critical. "After 1850," MP writes, "comes 'scientific' socialism, and what is given to science is taken from philosophy" (AD 86). The older Marx of Capital treats the dialectic as already-present in the structure of capitalist production; the critique is "scientific" (in the sense of: descriptive of objective relations); the outcome of history is already "contained" in the present as the "inevitable consequence of its contradictions."

MP's diagnosis: this naturalization of the dialectic is what allowed Leninism to treat the dialectic as an external object of scientific knowledge (see AD Ch 3 on Lenin). The older Marx is continuous with Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism in a way the younger Marx is not.

Marx's "Relations Mediated by Things"

The single most-cited Marx passage in MP is the definition of capital from Capital I: "not a thing, but a social relationship between persons mediated by things." MP treats this as the seed of the interworld concept. The insight: history is a field of persons-acting-through-things, neither pure intersubjectivity nor pure objectivity. It is this insight — not the dialectic in the object, not the teleology of the proletariat — that MP takes over into his own philosophy.

In Adventures of the Dialectic Ch 5 MP writes: "Marx... thought there were relationships between persons 'mediated by things,' and for him revolution, like capitalism, like all the realities of history, belonged to this mixed order. For Marx there was, and for Sartre there is not, a coming-to-be of meaning in institutions" (AD 149). The Marxian insight about the mixed order is what Sartre's cogito cannot accommodate.

Marx as Exemplar of Politics

Beyond his theoretical contributions, MP treats Marx as an exemplar of what political philosophy can be. In the Preface to Adventures of the Dialectic, MP distinguishes "important revolutionaries, and first of all Marx," from "minor figures" who use revolution as a displacement of personal obsession. Marx "lived their time rather than looked to it in the hope of forgetting their own obsessions" (AD 5). He understood that universal history is "not to be contemplated but to be made." This Weberian element in MP's reading of Marx — Marx as political scholar rather than utopian prophet — is continuous with MP's appreciation of Weber's politics of responsibility.

Marx in Sense and Non-Sense (1945–46): the human object and Capital as concrete Phenomenology of Mind

Two essays in *Sense and Non-Sense* are MP's most explicit identifications of Marx's project with phenomenology — and constitute his most sympathetic-from-the-inside published Marxism, partly retracted in AdV (1955) but never repudiated philosophically.

"Concerning Marxism" (Fontaine Nos. 48-9, February 1946; Chapter 8). Engaged with Maulnier's Au-delà du nationalisme (1938) and Violence et conscience (1945). MP's defining formula on economic determinism: "no progress can be made in the cultural order, no historical step can be taken unless the economy, which is like its schema and material symbol, is organized in a certain way" (p. 108). The "greatness of Marxism" is structurally located: "lies not in its having treated economics as the principal or unique cause of history but in its treating cultural history and economic history as two abstract aspects of a single process" (p. 105). See principal-condition. Marxism is open-ended: "history is both logical and contingent... nothing is absolutely fortuitous but also that nothing is absolutely necessary" (p. 114). The Russian Revolution's success was no accident and no necessity; the U.S.S.R. has accordingly returned to "the politics of cunning" — and "we are not even sure that it is the 'cunning of reason'" (p. 116).

"Marxism and Philosophy" (Revue internationale Vol. I, No. 6, June-July 1946; Chapter 9). Engaged with PCF intellectuals Naville, Garaudy, Cogniot, Hervé. MP's most explicit identifications of Marx with phenomenology:

  • The human object: "The introduction of the notion of the human object, which phenomenology has taken up and developed, was reserved for Marx" (p. 131). Streets, fields, houses are not "complexes of colors merely endowed with human significance by a secondary judgment"; "this significance adheres to the object as it presents itself in our experience." See human-object.
  • Practical materialism: "matter as the support and body of praxis." Marx's materialism is "the idea that all the ideological formations of a given society are synonymous with or complementary to a certain type of praxis"; "the meaning of a picture or a poem cannot be separated from the materiality of the colors or the words... Likewise, the 'spirit' of a society is already implied in its method of production" (pp. 130-131).
  • Das Kapital as concrete Phenomenology of Mind: "Hegel's logic is, as has been said, 'the algebra of the revolution.' The fetishism of goods is the historical accomplishment of that alienation which Hegel enigmatically describes, and Das Kapital — again as has been said — is a concrete Phenomenology of Mind" (p. 132). See capital-as-phenomenology.
  • Fulfilling philosophy by going beyond it: "You cannot do away with philosophy without fulfilling it" (p. 132, citing Marx). The philosopher's error is not to exist but "fancying that through thought they... can get at the truth about all other existences" — the Hegelian system's pretense.
  • Intersubjectivity as Marxism's hinge: "For the first time since Hegel, militant philosophy is reflecting not on subjectivity but on intersubjectivity. Transcendental subjectivity, Husserl pointed out, is intersubjectivity" (p. 133).

The "Concerning Marxism" + "Marxism and Philosophy" pair is the published origin of MP's open-Marxism position — preserved in critically modified form in HT (1947) and AdV (1955). The 1945-46 framing is more sympathetic to "the politics of the Communist Party" as a problem to be wrestled with from inside than HT or AdV; the structural diagnosis is already present, the political distance is not yet there. See candidate claim claims#mp-principal-condition-1945-pre-figures-ht-ad.

Connections

  • is the founder of Marxism, the tradition MP engages across his career
  • is read by Lukács (1923) in a dialectical-praxis register that MP takes as the strongest Marxist possibility (Ch 2 of AD)
  • is read by Lenin (1908) in a realist-gnostic register that MP criticizes (Ch 3 of AD)
  • is applied by Trotsky in a practical dialectic that MP diagnoses as internally unstable (Ch 4 of AD)
  • is interpreted by Sartre (1952–54) as ultrabolshevism — a Bolshevism without the dialectic
  • is the source of the formula "relations between persons mediated by things," which MP takes as the seed of interworld
  • is the source of the proletariat-as-Selbstaufhebung thesis, which MP engages critically in AD Ch 4
  • grounds humanism-in-extension (1947) via the 1844 Manuscripts and the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
  • is contrasted with Hegel — MP tracks how Marx's materialization of the Hegelian dialectic created new problems
  • is compared with Weber — AD reads Weber as a rival (and in MP's view more honest) philosopher of history; Weberian Marxism (Lukács) is the attempt to synthesize the two
  • is absent from the late ontology of V&I — by 1961 MP has largely set aside explicit Marxist vocabulary

Open Questions

  • Is MP's distinction between "young Marx" and "older Marx" historically accurate? The distinction was central to French post-war readings (Althusser's "epistemological break" is the most famous version, from the opposite direction). Whether Marx's thought has the internal fault-line MP and Althusser agree it has remains contested.
  • Is MP's reading of Marx on the "relations mediated by things" a fair reading or a phenomenological appropriation? Marx's own formulation is in the context of a specific argument about commodity fetishism; MP generalizes it into a principle about history as such.
  • How does MP's engagement with Marx shift between 1947 and 1955? The 1947 reprieve ("the only humanism which dares to develop its consequences") is abandoned in the 1955 Epilogue. But the 1960 Signs re-reads Marxism as "classic" — a gentler relationship. What has stabilized by 1960?
  • Does the late ontology absorb Marx? MP's language of "institution," "symbolic matrix," and "flesh" has Marxist resonances, but the explicit engagement with Marx fades after 1955. Is this a strategic retreat or a deeper absorption?
  • What would MP's assessment of Marx look like in light of the Grundrisse (published 1939, French 1967–68), which MP did not engage? The Grundrisse's elaboration of alienation and of capital-as-process may have spoken more directly to MP's concerns than the mature Capital did.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the most sustained engagement. Key passages: the Preface on Marx as political scholar (pp. 5–6); Ch 2 on the young Marx's dialectic and Lukács's reading (pp. 55–58); Ch 3 on the older Marx's realism (pp. 83–91); "Marx on capital as relations mediated by things" at AD 57 and again at AD 149; the Epilogue's self-revision of the Marxist reprieve (pp. 228–32).
  • merleau-ponty-1964-primacy-of-perception — Ch 7 (originally Humanism and Terror Ch 5, 1947): the reading of Marx via the 1844 Manuscripts and the Contribution; the "humanism in extension" formula. Translator's Introduction (Bien): Marx's relation to Hegel.
  • merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — Part Three Ch III and its long footnote on historical materialism; the "class before class consciousness" argument.
  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — Introduction pp. 9–14: Marx and Marxism as "classic"; the Signs Introduction's re-reading of Marxism after the critique of Adventures of the Dialectic.
  • merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — occasional references to Marx; the philosopher's "communication" with Marxist tradition.