Dear Editors
There is a world beyond the senses, SJW informs us (May Socialist Standard) (true!) but ‘we are only ever speaking of our experience of it’. This is pure empiricism, the phenomenalism of Kant, the logical positivists (Mach, Carnap) and the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida et al) Karl Marx was not a phenomenalist but a dialectical materialist who embraced a ratio-empiricist epistemology (a critical realism or science) that sought to understand the reality of the material world (including capitalism) by going beyond immediate experience of appearances (phenomena). Nobody has ever experienced a dinosaur, or photosynthesis.
Brian Morris,
Lewes
PS. In my Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism (Black Rose 2022) I defend philosophical materialism as a metaphysic against its current detractors, especially the postmodernists and phenomenalists like Latour.
SJW writes:
Marx was a skeptic by confession – his motto was ‘Doubt everything’. He was ‘no Marxist’, but criticised the entire edifice of philosophy that defends the brutal experience of private property with bewildering flights of fancy. The ‘Marxists’ that followed bewailed the fact that Marx did not leave them a philosophy. Engels and Kautsky provided their thoughts as substitute, and the entire edifice of dialectical and other materialisms is based on their works and later the likes of Lukacs and Bukharin. It is my argument that dialectical materialism and other ‘isms’ sometimes mangle the position that Marx took. I don’t claim to know Marx’s mind, as Brian Morris does, or to install him in the pantheon of capitalist thinkers: only to think clearly, as a worker in capitalism, and come to similar conclusions to Marx in the present day. We should expect to do our own thinking, as workers, simple yet profoundly different from capitalist teachings, being more daring than complex.
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