MARX, MATERIALIST DIALECTICS, AND PRAXIS: Volume 1: Beyond Modernity and Postmodernity

By Peter Critchley

Marx and Materialist Dialectics is a four volume study of Marx's critical-emancipatory praxis, locating Marx on the post-modern terrain, developing notions of an 'active materialism' in the society-nature interchange as a critique of modernity's 'alien' rationalisation. The work draws a distinction between a scientistic-deterministic Marxism and a critical-emancipatory Marxism in order to establish freedom as the end of Marx's practical critique. The book emphasises Marx's concern to facilitate the recovery of human subjectivity from within the alienated forms through which sociability has come to be expressed, thus affirming conscious, creative human agency in a social world that is bounded by a given and inherited natural world. The book therefore places the society-nature interchange at the centre of Marx's materialist dialectics. Volume 1 Beyond Modernity and Postmodernity sets the 'crisis of Marxism' in the context of the 'crisis of Modernity,' and contrasts Marx's approach favourably with current intellectual trends. Here I distinguish between the different views that are discernible within Marxism, emphasising Marx's emancipatory commitment and making the case for Marx's materialist analysis in light of the postmodern and post-marxist reaction against 'grand narratives,' realism, and substantive grounds. I argue for an open Marxism based on critique, praxis, and materialist dialectics as against a closed Marxism that emphasises economic determinism, structure over agency, the fetishism of concepts as well as things, and alienation. I show that for Marx the world is a field of materialist immanence, of objectified subjectivity. I argue that, rather than writing theory, which tends to rationalize a given reality, Marx engaged in the critique of capital's social metabolic order of alien control. As against the fetishisation of structures and categories associated with the theorisation, rationalisation, and naturalisation of complexity, Marx shows how, as knowledgeable and creative agents, we may come to see through and break through the fetish systems of politics, power, and production in order to recover our subjectivity. The book therefore defines a 'philosophy of praxis' as against the contemplative-passive approach to knowledge.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CQPL37P3
• ISBN13: 9798872387749
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 320 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"