(Anti-)humanism: the paradox of theory in Marx

A father is told by God that he must sacrifice his own son. Abraham climbs Mount Moriah with Isaac in tow, binds him, and prepares himself for the deed.
A relatively brief biblical story, yet one which inspired philosophical examination, or better, elaboration, or even abstraction (what is philosophy but an elaborate abstraction from concrete phenomena?) for many thousands of years. Even in the 1800s, one of the foremost continental philosophers explored a number of theoretical categories using this ancient tale as a starting point - Soren Kierkegaard describes the paradoxical nature of Abraham's predicament in Fear and Trembling (2006: Cambridge University Press).
He starts from the common opposition between the particular (the needs of the individual) and the universal (the needs of society), and notes that taking a "moral" path usually involves supressing the particular in favour of the universal; for instance, I sacrifice my wish to gain a new car easily through theft and thereby help to uphold the (ethical rules of the) society in which I live. But Abraham's commitment presents a fundamental challenge to this dialectical opposition - he breaches the universal moral code through his willingness to kill his own son, but does not thereby assert the particular; he is prepared to lose his own heir, he does not fulfil his individual needs/wishes.
And so we have the paradox of faith - Abraham appeals beyond the universal for ethical approval, to the absolute, to God. "That is the paradox by which he remains at the apex and which he cannot make clear to anyone else [because to make it clear to anyone else he would have to re-enter the universal (i.e. a shared system of meaning)], for the paradox is that he as the single individual places himself in an absolute relation to the absolute (ibid, p. 54)".

Marx: humanist or not? Most people, especially his followers, would answer with the former - this great philosopher, especially towards the end of his life, fought for the reclaiming of man by man, of humanity by humanity, through socialism.
Yes indeed, the evidence is in his more political works, such as The Communist Manifesto, and his practical interventions, including his involvement with the First International.
But what about on a theoretical level? After all, Marx was primarily a philosopher - so was he theoretically humanist or anti-humanist? Did he, in the words of Althusser, (Philosophy and the Spontaneous philosophy of the Scientists, 1990: Verso) adopt "a concept of man as an originating subject, one in whom originate his needs...his thoughts...and his acts and struggles (p. 239)"? Or did he radically negate this concept?
In Capital (1976: Penguin), the most detailed, practical, applied, manifestation of Marx's philosophy, there is a sort of struggle between these opposing tendencies - surely appropriate for this dialectician, who believed that antagonism was at the heart of everything. Here, he presents a "science of society", the premise of which must be a negation of the idea of "(wo)man" in favour of a series of abstract categories. Althusser (ibid) puts it better: "Marx therefore starts out from the structural cause producing the bourgeois ideology which maintains the illusion that you should start with man: Marx starts from the given economic formation...and the relations which it determines in the last instance in the superstructure. And each time he shows that these relations determine and brand men... (p. 239)".

Let's jump to Marx's chapter on The Working Day to illustrate the Frenchman's point:

"What is a working day?... We have seen that capital's reply to these questions is this: the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing its services. Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital (p. 375)."

He paints a bleak picture: "the worker is nothing other than labour-power" - that is, the human being is simply treated as an abstract category, a force which is ripe for exploitation, by capital. But is this the way it should be, according to Marx?
I give you an anecdote:

"In London three railwaymen - a guard, and engine-driver, and a signalman - are up before a coroner's jury. A tremendous railway accident has dispatched hundreds of passengers into the next world. The negligence of the railway workers is the cause of the misfortune [note the sarcasm]. They declare with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before their labour lasted only 8 hours a day. During the last five or six years, they say, it has been screwed up to 14, 18 and 20 hours, and when the pressure of holiday travellers is especially severe, when excursion trains are put on, their labour often lasts for 40 or 50 hours without a break. They are ordinary men, not Cyclops (p. 363)."

The last sentence of the passage reveals Marx's acute sympathy for the workers, for the individuals exploited by capital. This makes sense - the sympathy, the humanism, which drove him to political action could not help but seep through his theoretical writings.
But this is not one of many unsystematic "slips of the tongue", in which the stoic, scientific character of his work is revealed as a mere façade for the idealistic humanism within. He uses this particular case, and many others, as examples of the voracity of capital for labour-power, as examples of the tendency of capital towards an unlimited working day - that is, we must understand this anecdote within the context of the first passage quoted. So once Marx has established his (anti-humanist) theoretical principles, he allows himself to riff a little, to relax into sympathetic sentences about the exploitation of "ordinary men".
So then, do have an answer to our question: Marx, humanist or not?

At this point, we return to Kierkegaard  - the work of Marx confronts us with a certain paradox of theory, which cannot be subsumed under the binary opposition of humanism/anti-humanism. Marx's fundamental theoretical practice, his theory itself, negates humanism on a higher plane than simple anti-humanism - it "places [itself] in an absolute relation to the absolute".

"But if the ethical is indeed teleologically suspended in this manner, how then does the single individual in whom it is suspended exist? He exists as the particular in contrast to the universal. Does he then sin? For this is the form of sin, viewed ideally...If one denies that this form can be repeated in such a way that it is not sin, then judgment has fallen upon Abraham. How then did Abraham exist? He believed."

I hope I'm not completely dropping my materialist rigour when I employ the idea of "belief" - because it appears that Marx's theory exists in so far as it believes in the possibility of a truly humanist, post-capitalist, socialist society. This is the "absolute" which it appeals to, the absolute which allows it to avoid the sin of bourgeois humanism. It looks to a reality beyond the dehumanising reality of capitalism.

Introduction to a critique of Adorno's philosophy

The work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most important German philosophers (and cultural critics) of the 20th Century, is most obviously critiqueable from a political or practical perspective - "yes, what you're saying might be true, might be untouchable in the realm of theory, but how are we supposed to enact, to live out, your philosophy?" A precis of his thoughts on human agency: devoting ourselves to the "bad social totality" is wrong, but  so is rebelling against it to the extent that the latter action helps this totality to reproduce itself, to change but persist, while also allowing the rebels to slip back into it seamlessly at a later stage.
A good example to apply this idea to is the Occupy movement.
Where are the protesters now? Working in jobs, I assume.
What has happened to global capitalism? Nothing, it continues to function as normal.
So what do we do then Adorno?
The progression of his own life provides a number of fragments that we can rearrange into a broad thesis about the politics of this intellectual giant - or better, about his non-politics of withdrawal. Towards the end of his life Adorno was stationed in Frankfurt; it was here that during the 1968 student protests the philosopher became the subject of much ire from the young radicals. During one of his lectures on dialectical thinking, a student chalked on the blackboard: "if Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease", following which three ladies strolled up to their lecturer and threw petals on his head as they pulled up their shirts and bared their breasts.
Left weary of confrontation after a number of similar incidents, he withdrew to the small town of Zermatt, at the bottom of the Matterhorn, deep in the Swiss alps. He died some months later.
This final relocation (after so many throughout his lifetime, within and from Germany to America and back) in the face of mass insurrectionary action is somewhat telling - Adorno eschewed revolutionary measures and instead withdrew from the "bad social totality" (his term, not mine).
This is what I mean when I describe his "non-politics of withdrawal"; on a concrete-political level, a critique can be made very easily: while revolt may be a type of opposition which is inscribed in the totality, an Adornoian personal withdrawal allows the totality to function untouched, undisrupted. Insurrection may only lead to reform which allows the totality to persist (as occurred after 1968) but withdrawal negates the possibility of a true revolution, no matter how slim it might be. Also, such reform might make this totality "less bad".
However, our intervention here remains on a purely practical/political level. The mere fact that we had to extract a solid political argument from Adorno's life events (couple with his theoretical writings), the fact that this great philosopher, musician, essayist rarely wrote about what should be done in the political sphere, instead focusing on what shouldn't, shows that such an intervention will be inadequate if we wish to thoroughly critique his thought - Adorno must be attacked on his own plane, philosophy must be refuted on the level of philosophy.

Philosophy is a battlefield, the Kantian "Kampfplatz", where a war rages between materialism and idealism - we have Louis Althusser to thank for this insight (Lenin & Philosophy, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, Verso: 1990). This is because any kind of philosophy has no concrete object "it is impossible to prove the ultimate principles of materialism just as it is impossible to prove...the principles of idealism. [This is] because they cannot be the object of a knowledge, meaning by that a knowledge comparable with that of a science that does prove the properties of objects (Ibid, p. 193)."
 And because philosophy has no object, essentially nothing can happen in it - "Philosophy merely re-examines and ruminates over arguments which represent the basic conflict of these tendencies in the form of categories (p. 193)".
This argument is quite familiar to those who readily dismiss philosophy - "it's all bullshit" - but it's quite astounding that Althusser was able to think this idea within its lofty realm.
Anyways, every philosopher falls on either side of the fence: "There is no third way, no bastard position, anymore than there is in politics (p. 192/3)". This materialism/idealism opposition complements the opposition between science and ideology - in the latter, we have provable/proven hypotheses about the properties of objects conterposed with the spontaneous understandings of the world which allow people to function in their social roles and obscure the contradictions constitutive of the societies in which they live. Materialism, a concept, a position, which has been the subject of innumerable elaborations, essentially holds "that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena (from the American Dictionary of the English Language, 2000; on thefreedictionary.com). Those in the idealist camp argue the inverse, that "the real is of the nature of thought or that the object of external perception consists of ideas (Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, 2010; on thefreedictionary.com)". In this way, materialism is profoundly linked to science, while the two ide's - idealism and ideology - make a cosy couple. This thesis is fortified by the history of "dialectical materialism", better known as "Marxist philosophy". Interestingly enough, this philosophy was never fully outlined by Marx; he provided some initial sketches in a number of his early writings (e.g. The German Ideology), then wrote his groundbreaking historico-sociological work of analysis, Capital, and died. It was up to his followers; Engels, Lenin and later Althusser (among others); to elaborate the principles of this philosophy.
So why didn't the main man do it himself? His successors elaborated the principles from Capital; his philosophy was at work, in its practical state, in its three volumes, in which he founded "historical materialism" and thus (in the words of Althusser) opened up the content of history to science. There is no doubt - Capital was a scientific work, with human social formations as its object, which was written from the side of materialism. That's why it was so revolutionary; it overturned the previous idealist conceptions of society and history and revealed the idealism veiled in the work of some so-called materialists which obscured the domination inscribed in capitalism.
There you have it - science and materialism versus ideology and idealism - the former two representing "truth" and thus being a just and necessary guide for revolutionary practice, and the latter two being obfuscatory and instrumental to prolonging domination.

So at the end of this long divergence, we arrive at the beginning - which side did Adorno fight for?

My instinct is that he was an idealist wolf in a materialist sheep's costume, purely because of the political consequences of his philosophy.
As Marx said, philosophy and revolutionary practice are inseparable, they both inform each other. So if the practical advice which can be extracted from Adorno's philosophy is essentially "withdraw", "do not rebel", then it must be assumed that his philosophy is, on a deeper level, a malign and underhanded praise of the current state of the world, and hence idealist.
But again, we are dabbling too close to the political plane here - like I wrote earlier, his philosophy must be critiqued on a purely theoretical level if we are to slay the beast dead, if we are to prevent it from striking out from the ground with philosophical arguments to counter our (currently political) attacks.

I will read more and then pick up the sword - this topic needs more thought.