Critique

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More than a theory: ‘a guide to action!’ Theses

on Marx (on reading Ernst Bloch, the principle of
hope)

Cliff Slaughter

To cite this article: Cliff Slaughter (2020) More than a theory: ‘a guide to action!’ Theses
on Marx (on reading Ernst Bloch, the principle of hope), Critique, 48:4, 549-562, DOI:
10.1080/03017605.2020.1850785

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2020.1850785

Published online: 19 Jan 2021.

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Critique, 2020
Vol. 48, No. 4, 549–562, https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2020.1850785

More than a theory: ‘a guide to

action!’ Theses on Marx (on reading
Ernst Bloch, the principle of hope)
Cliff Slaughter

The article argues that Marx’s materialism has not been understood by Marxists, and
that, without a radical reorientation, a new beginning – essential today – is impossible.
Marx departed from all earlier materialism because it omitted ‘the active side’, missing
the essential understanding that the ‘being’ which determines consciousness has been,
continues to be – and now demands to be – changed by human practice. The proletariat
is the agency of the socialist change corresponding to ‘the standpoint of socialised
humanity’, the future. The depths of the earlier materialism’s failure were
epitomised by Joseph Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism, circulated
world-wide, to Communist Party members at the time of the Moscow trials. A
suitable background to the state murder of tens of millions, it ignored completely
‘the active side’. Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope rescued Marx’s materialism,
showing that the proletarian standpoint encompasses the struggle for the whole of
the arts and sciences.

Keywords: Bloch; materialism; proletariat; Stalinism; Marx; ‘the active side’

Part I: religion
In 1842, Marx wrote:
Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time, the time
must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally
through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.1
And later the same year, he said the following in a letter to Arnold Ruge: ‘ … religion
in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with
the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself.’2 By

1
Karl Marx, ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,’ MECW, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1975), p. 195.

© 2020 Critique
550 C. Slaughter
September 1843, this idea had been developed. In his Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Marx clarified it when he wrote that ‘criticism of religion is
the premise of all criticism … ’ and went on:
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make
man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either
not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract
being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society.
This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because
they are an inverted world … [Religion] is the fantastic realisation of the human
essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion
is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual
aroma. (My emphases, CS.)3
When, in his Theses on Feuerbach (quoted below), Marx wrote that the old materi-
alism left out ‘the active side’, he meant that within ‘Being’ there is active humanity
– its most dynamic element. For the old materialists, ‘Being’ was merely contem-
plated as ‘Object’. If they saw human beings as part of ‘Being’, they saw them only
contemplatively, and not as the agent, sensuously active, their practice continually
changing the world (‘Being’), making history, and making themselves.
In capitalist society, this work – practice changing the world – is done by the
exploited, oppressed class, the class of wage-labourers. These wage-labourers are
reduced to the embodiment of the commodity labour-power, which they must sell.
The worker, Marx wrote, is ‘time’s carcase’.4 But they – the workers – are human.
Reduced to ‘time’s carcase’, if they do not find work, then they are on the scrapheap.
The workers’ only salvation is to band together to put an end to their proletarian
existence. This is nothing less than, as Ernst Bloch put it, ‘humanity actively compre-
hending itself’: it is no mere hoped-for ideal. The task is to ‘free the at-present-
repressed elements of the future.’5
When the Silesian weavers revolted in 1844, Marx insisted that an understanding
of the significance of the workers’ action required two things: ‘some scientific insight
and some love of mankind’.6 The Silesian revolt was an isolated outburst, but it con-
stituted a revolutionary threat to the state because it represented protest in the name
of humanity against a dehumanised life. Against Ruge and others, who saw the revolt
only as an isolated event, Marx insisted on its revolutionary significance. In contrast
to the bourgeois revolution, the proletarian revolution, as Franz Mehring summar-
ised it:

2
Marx to Arnold Ruge, November 30, 1842: MECW, vol. 1, p. 395.
3
Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law in MECW, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence
&Wishart, 1975), p. 175.
4
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), p.127.
5
Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vols. 1–3 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1954, 1955, 1959); English edition
translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1986, 1995), vol. 1, p. 199; vol. 3, p. 1357.
6
Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”,
Vorwärts!, No.64, August 10 1844’, in MECW, vol. 3, pp. 204–205.
 Critique 551
… was caused by isolation from humanity and the real commonwealth of human-
ity. The isolation from the latter was incomparably more thoroughly, more intol-
erable, more terrible and innately more contradictory than isolation from the
political commonwealth, and therefore the liquidation of this isolation, even as a
partial phenomenon represented by the revolt of the Siberian weavers, was a
much more tremendous affair, just as the human being was more than the
citizen, human life more than political life.7
When Marx demanded ‘some scientific insight’, he saw this as derived from the
analysis of that ‘ensemble of social relations’ in which humanity carries out its
work.8 He wrote to Feuerbach in 1844 of ‘the concept of the human species
brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth. What is this but
the concept of society!’9 Developing this was to be Marx’s own life’s work. He
came to communism through philosophy. Philosophy needed to find a dynamic
element in the social ensemble: that element was the proletariat. Alongside his
work on political economy, Marx always studied and intervened in the working-
class movement – as is exemplified by his participation in the founding of the First
International, his writings on the Paris Commune and his ‘Critique of the Gotha
Programme’.10
For Marx, then: ‘man’ – and not any non-material being – is ‘the highest being for
man’.11 But, further to that – as his tenth thesis on Feuerbach asserts – ‘The stand-
point of the old materialism is “civil” [that is, bourgeois] society; the standpoint of
the new is human society, associated [socialised] humanity.’ And it is at this point
that reading Ernst Bloch’s inspirational The Principle of Hope can bring us back to
the essence of the revolutionary philosophical development Marx made. Bloch
writes that ‘the new, proletarian standpoint … allows … [materialism] to come
home … the care for man at its centre, the real removal of his self-alienation as its
goal’; and that ‘this impassioned man (Marx) feels that he is himself a human
being and [that] others are human beings too and yet for the most part are treated
like dogs’.12 Or, as Marx wrote in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law:

7
Franz Mehring, Marx, the Story of His Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), p. 84. In his ‘Critical
Marginal Notes’, Ibid., Marx wrote:
The community from which the worker is isolated by his own labour is life itself, physical and mental life,
human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature. Human nature is the true community of
men. The disastrous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably more universal, more intolerable,
more dreadful, and more contradictory than isolation from the political community. Hence, too, the abolition
of this isolation – and even a partial reaction to it, an uprising against it [as represented by the revolt of the
Silesian weavers] – is just as much more infinite as man [humanity] is more infinite than the citizen, and
human life more infinite than political life. Therefore, however partial the uprising of the industrial workers
may be, it contains within itself a universal soul … (Emphases in original.)
8
See the sixth thesis on Feuerbach below.
9
Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11, 1844, MECW, vol, 3, p. 354.
10
See, for example, David Fernbach (ed.), Karl Marx, The First International and After. Political Writings
Volume 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin with New Left Review, 1974).
11
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, MECW, vol. 3, p. 182; as quoted by
Bloch, Principle, vol. 1, p. 264.
12
Bloch, ibid.
552 C. Slaughter
The critique of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for
man, therefore with the categorical imperative to overturn all circumstances in
which man is a degraded, a subjugated, a forsaken, a contemptible human being.13

Part II: materialism?

(a) Being and consciousness
We twentieth-century Marxists considered ourselves materialists. We knew that
‘being determines consciousness’ – as against idealism, which says the opposite.
My recent reading of Bloch has helped me to understand that we – I speak for
myself at least – had failed to grasp what Marx wrote on this question. Materialism
before Marx was confined to perception of the world (‘Being’). For Marx, perception
(that is, perception which is passive, contemplative) is replaced, as Bloch expressed it,
by the human activity factor – that is by practice. Materialists, including Feuerbach,
did not know consciousness in its practical form.14
This means that humans actually apprehend/perceive/come to know the world
(‘Being’) through their activity/practice. This practice was seen by the earlier materi-
alists only one-sidedly, as perception, contemplation, and not – as in Marx – as work,
the work of humans, themselves part of nature (actually its most advanced and
unique form), consciously (NB the chapter on ‘The Labour Process’ in Capital)15
reacting on the rest of nature, but always as a part of it.
However, man’s product rules over him. In capitalism, the wage-labourer produces
surplus value, which is accumulated as capital. This capital’s existence and impera-
tives rule over the labourer who produces it but is unfree. And so, the real ‘Being’
(in ‘being determines consciousness’) is the world as acted upon, already worked
on, and being worked on, by humans: but, note, by humans in a definite set, or totality
– Marx says ‘ensemble’ – of social relations: and not the ‘generic’ individuals as con-
ceived by Feuerbach. This action (practice, work) and these social relations, with their
own inner contradictions and processes, are the real, active and changing, most criti-
cal element in that ‘Being’ which determines consciousness, with ‘consciousness’ here
meaning the forms of consciousness consequent on the basic (conscious) action of
working humans in society. And this action is work.
Under the rule of capital, the totality or ‘ensemble’ of social relations is such that
the proletariat is the agency of this work. It is both object (that is, the most advanced
and historically active element in ‘Being’ as determinant of consciousness), and
subject (i.e. the creator and re-creator of that ‘Being’ which determines subsequent
and consequent forms of consciousness). Here – it can be added – there is an antici-
pation of the vexed question of ‘economic base and ideological superstructure’,

13
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, MECW, vol. 3, p. 183.
14
Bloch, Principle, vol. 1, pp. 210–233.
15
Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. 1, MECW, vol. 50 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 2003), pp. 187–209.
 Critique 553
properly understood. That is to say, with clarity that the base itself is increasingly
man-made, created by human beings in definite historically formed sets of social
relations, with their contradictions, class divisions and developmental processes.
Just as, when Marx uses the term ‘productive forces’, he means in the very first
place humans and their work.
At this point, it is necessary to remind ourselves of what Marx wrote in his 1845
Theses on Feuerbach.16

1. The chief defect of all previous materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that
things, reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of
contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.
Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism,
was set forth by idealism – but only abstractly, since of course, idealism does
not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects,
really distinct [that is: ‘to be really distinguished’, CS.] from conceptual
objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. In
Das Wesen des Christentums, he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as
the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and defined
only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance.17 Hence he does not grasp the sig-
nificance of ‘revolutionary’, of practical, activity.
2. The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not
a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the
reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute
over the reality or non-reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is
a purely scholastic question.
3. The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbring-
ing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances
and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and
that the educator must himself be educated. Hence, this doctrine is bound to
divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society (in Robert
Owen, for example.)

16
Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, MECW, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), pp. 6–8 (version edited
by Engels, written in 1845 and published in German in his Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen
deutschen Philosophie, Stuttgart, 1888).
17
The German “schmutzig-jüdischen Erscheinungsform” – in English sometimes rendered as “dirty-judaical
form of appearance” – is used in line with what Roman Rosdolsky, in a refutation of attacks on Marx and Engels
as anti-Semites, referred to as Marx’s derivation of the ‘Jewish national character’ (Volkscharakter) of his time
from the factual historical role that the Jews played in the Middle Ages and the modern period as representatives
of merchants’ and usurers’ capital … Judaism for him meant a social characteristic; the ‘chimerical nationality of
the Jew’ meant “the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
See Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848
(Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986. Special Issue of Critique, nos. 18–19), ‘Appendix: The Neue Rheinische Zeitung
and the Jews’, p. 198. For further discussion, see Peter Fryer, ‘Engels: a Man of his Time’, in John Lea and Geoff
Pilling (eds.), The Condition of Britain: Essays on Frederick Engels (London: Pluto Press, 1996), esp. pp. 138–144.
554 C. Slaughter
4. Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the dupli-
cation of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work
consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks
the fact that after completing his work, the chief thing sill remains to be done.
For the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in
the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife
and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, there-
fore, be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contra-
diction, revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is
discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be cri-
ticised in theory and transformed in practice.
5. Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, appeals to sensuous contempla-
tion, but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous
activity.
6. Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the
essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its
reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not
enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged: [i]. To abstract
from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by
itself, and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual. [ii]. The
essence of man, therefore, can with him be regarded only as ‘species’, as an
inner, mute, general character which unites the many individuals only in a
natural way.
7. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a
social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs in
reality to a particular form of society.
8. Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysti-
cism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of
this practice.
9. The highest point attained by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism
which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contempla-
tion of single individuals in ‘civil society’.
10. The standpoint of the old materialism is ‘civil’ society; the standpoint of the new
is human society, associated humanity.
11. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it. [Emphases in original.]

To the third thesis, I would add an emphasis on the point that, if Feuerbach says
that ‘Being’ determines – that is, educates – consciousness, then he needs to be told
that ‘Being’ (our world, our environment) itself is all the time being conditioned
(educated) by conscious human practice/work.
This new materialism – truly a revolution in philosophy – was fundamental to all
Marx’s later work. Thus in his critique of political economy, Capital, we find:
 Critique 555
[Man] sets in motion the natural forces pertaining to his physical nature, arms and
legs, head and hands, in order to acquire natural material in a form useful for his
own life. Because he acts on and changes nature outside himself through this move-
ment, he simultaneously changes his own nature … The earth itself is a working
material, but presupposes a whole series of other working materials before it can
serve as working material in agriculture, and an already relatively high develop-
ment of working capacity.18
Some thousands of years ago, the history of the world (that is, of what is called in phil-
osophy ‘Being’) began to be decisively changed. This change was – and has continued
to be, and will be in the future – wrought by human beings. The making and using of
tools, production consciously initiated and controlled, has taken the world, including
humanity, beyond the realm of simply natural necessity and evolution. Consequently
the world became, as it is now, open to change of a new kind, the elements of which can
be comprehended, explored and realised. This was the first human revolution. ‘Being’,
now containing as its most dynamic element, human practice, work, foresight, creativ-
ity, is pregnant with a future that is beyond the ancient necessities of natural evolution-
ary stages. This was Marx’s discovery. (So much – one might suggest at this point – for
the originality of the currently fashionable talk about ‘the anthropocene’.)
When Marx summarises and concludes in his final statement – the famous ‘ele-
venth thesis’ – that ‘[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it’ – he is referring directly to the assertion
in Thesis 4: the ‘secular basis’ of religion, i.e. class society with its contradictions
and the alienation it inflicts on people, must be understood and ‘revolutionised in
practice’. Elsewhere he explains that ‘philosophy finds its material weapon in the pro-
letariat.’19 This is the meaning of Marx’s often-used phrase, ‘revolutionising practice’.
As an aside – and in the light of the disastrous and dehumanising role of Stalinism in
the twentieth century – I note Josef Stalin’s version of materialism. In his ‘Dialectical
and Historical Materialism,’ issued as part of the History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, he quotes from the Theses on Feuerbach, but
never once mentions the first thesis in which Marx states that ‘the chief defect’ of all
earlier accounts of materialism including Feuerbach’s – ‘is that things, reality, sensu-
ousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as
human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively;’ and that the consequence has
been that ‘the active side’ was developed, not by materialism but by idealism.
Whether Stalin actually wrote the essay (as Isaac Deutscher thought), or deputed
the task to one of the hirelings working on the Short Course, the ‘philosophy’ he pro-
moted was read by Communist party members all over the world.20 Its dehumanised

18
Marx, Capital vol. I, chapter 7, as cited by Bloch, Principle, vol. 1, p. 261.
19
‘As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in
philosophy.’ Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,’ MECW, vol. 3,
p. 187.
20
J. V. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism in History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(Bolsheviks): Short Course, first published in Russian in October 1938.
556 C. Slaughter
‘materialism’ – the antithesis of Marx’s – was a fitting expression of the thinking that
accompanied the 1937–9 purges and the organised state murder of millions.
Is Marx’s revolution in philosophy of relevance to his revolutionary politics? Marx-
ists have understood, of course, that it is the working class (capitalism’s ‘gravediggers’,
as the Communist Manifesto put it), which must make the social revolution. And in the
great majority they have understood materialism simply as meaning that ‘being deter-
mines consciousness’. Neither proposition is adequate in itself. The fundamental con-
nection between the two can be grasped, and their meaning deepened, only in the light
of Marx’s break from earlier materialism, including that of Feuerbach.
Here an important example is Lenin’s understanding of materialism. His Materi-
alism and Empirio-Criticism was written in December 1908. It contains thirty-nine
references to Feuerbach, in every case doing no more than confirming that, like
Marx, Feuerbach was a consistent materialist.21 Nowhere is it indicated that Marx
had to make a decisive break with Feuerbach. It is impossible not to conclude that
in 1908 Lenin had not grasped that fundamental break. Only in 1914 did he study
Hegel, his purpose being to understand what Marx meant by seeing Hegel as the
source of his dialectical method. In his notes on the Science of Logic, Lenin interprets
one of Hegel’s paragraphs as meaning: ‘Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objec-
tive world, but creates it.’22 (My emphasis, CS).
There is here, certainly, a glimmer of the new, true materialism of Marx – that is,
an understanding much closer to Marx’s critical response to Feuerbach, in that it
resembles Marx’s insistence in the ‘Theses’ that the ‘active side’ was dealt with
only by idealism, by Hegel in particular. But is it any more than a glimmer? Lenin
goes no further in that direction. He is concerned here only with the important
truth that man’s cognition ‘stands opposed to the objective world, from which it
obtains determinate content and fulfilment.’23 This surely is little more than an affir-
mation that through his practice the subject – man – derives the content of his con-
sciousness from the objective, independently existing world. Back to square one.
Dare I suggest this? If – like me – your understanding was hitherto limited to mate-
rialism as it pre-dated Marx, plus the conviction that the working class is the force to
bring about the social revolution, plus agreement with the eleventh thesis’s prop-
osition that the ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world … the point is to
change it’, you were indeed in good company: that of Lenin. But we were wrong.

(b) Changing our world

Once the decisive role of the proletariat as the agent of ‘revolutionising practice’ is
grasped as the primary content of what was new in Marx’s materialism, then we

21
V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 14 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1962).
22
‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic’ in Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 38 (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1972), p. 212.
23
Ibid.
 Critique 557
can see how this materialism is dialectical and historical, as against – as Bloch puts it –
‘merely contemplative knowledge [which] necessarily refers to what is closed and
thus to what is past, [and] … is hopeless against what is present and blind to the
future.’24
In his Grundrisse, Marx wrote the little understood sentence: ‘The anatomy of man
is a key to the anatomy of the ape.’25 He was writing at a time when it had become
understood that the human species had evolved from ‘the ape’. Marx’s sentence
means that just as we understand the anatomy of the (pre-human) ape only when
we start from what that predecessor has evolved into, has become, homo sapiens,
so we understand the past from the standpoint of an understanding of the
‘anatomy’ of the present. Seeking the right method, then, what is the ‘key’ to our
social order of today, with all its processes and conflicts and contradictions? I
propose that it is the truly human future society of free and equal individuals in
control of their own destiny, that form of society just-beyond-the-horizon, which is
the key to our present society and culture.
The relation between this ‘key’ and our understanding of Marx’s new materialism
is fundamental to all theory and practice. Thus Bloch writes:
The being that conditions consciousness and the consciousness that processes being, is
understood ultimately only out of that and in that from which and towards which it
tends. Essential being is not Been-ness; on the contrary: the essential being of the
world lies itself on the Front.26
This beyond-the-horizon, future, free society finds its roots, its first shoots, in those
forces which by their work daily create and re-create our present world. And there
is more. Those forces, humans as a productive force, the class of workers, will find
themselves driven by their needs, by their deprivation, their degradation, their threa-
tened dehumanisation and their must-be-overcome existence.27 They will discover,
through many bitter experiences and false solutions to their imperative needs, that
they have no partial or lasting solutions to the threat of complete dehumanisation
without overturning the rule of capital over human beings, in order themselves to
build a new social order. This is the socialist revolution, the second human
revolution.28

24
Bloch, Principle, vol. 1, p. 198.
25
Karl Marx, ‘The Method of Political Economy,’ Grundrisse (1857–8), Introduction: Section 3, MECW, vol.
28 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), p. 42.
26
Bloch, Principle, vol. 1, ‘Introduction’, which can be consulted online (accessed 5 August 2020) at https://
www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/introduction.htm.
27
To re-emphasise what Marx wrote (see above, note 14): ‘The critique of religion ends with the teaching
that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which
man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.’
28
See below. Elsewhere I have explored the question of the socialist revolution as ‘a second “human revolu-
tion” … like the first human revolution (the transition from pre-human to human and the origins of culture) but
overcoming the dehumanisation imposed by the oppressive and exploitative social systems of more recent
history (forms of oriental despotism … : slavery and feudalism in Europe; and finally the rule of capital,
which soon became a global system), and … appropriating, this time for all, the historic conquests of humanity’s
558 C. Slaughter
Again, contrast the old materialism: ‘Merely contemplative knowledge necessarily
refers to what is closed and thus to what is past, it is helpless against what is present
and blind to the future’.29 Instead: ‘But the root of history is the working, creative
human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped
himself and established what is his without expropriation and alienation, in real
democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of
all and in which no one has yet been: homeland’.30
In Capital, Marx was to show even more clearly the essence of the social-revolu-
tionary role of the proletariat. At the root of all the degradation, alienation and
inhumanity inflicted on the working class is its inescapable position of structural
antagonist of capital and its rule. Reforms of their conditions can be won and lost,
with – it must be stressed again – the inevitable impossibility of lasting, let alone fun-
damental gains. But there is a more basic, deep-rooted source of the necessity of
working-class revolution. Besides being the class which does the work that conditions
and changes the world (Being), the very life of proletarians under the rule of capital is
one of alienation. Inescapably, their labour is wage-labour. To the capital system and
its personifications, every worker is nothing but the embodiment of labour-time, a
commodity to be exploited. That is day-to-day dehumanising. This is the basic
reason why alienation cannot be overcome without removing its cause, the capital
system itself. The self-realisation of this necessity through sustained practical-revolu-
tionary action, is the road to the future.
And this future is no abstract, ideal utopia. Marx’s purpose in Capital is to demon-
strate the necessity of revolutionising practice by the proletariat armed with real
knowledge of the contradictions and processes causing its own alienated existence
in capitalist society. In this way, the problem is not how to bring some abstract
ideal to reality, but to comprehend and bring to full life in the light of a new day
the at-present repressed elements of a humanised society.

(c): A ‘human revolution’

When Marx called the proletarian (socialist) revolution the human revolution, he was
showing us the full scope of the social revolution, and opening up an understanding
of revolutionary potential even beyond that of the exploited wage-slaves. Ernst Bloch
explained:
Marxism alone, with its realisation that class society, particularly capitalist class
society, causes every form of self-alienation, has advanced to the eliminable root
of that society. Even to the extent that as the eliminating power of the proletariat
grows stronger, Marxist humanity can describe ever-increasing circles: definitely
beyond the radically exploited, definitely towards all who suffer common

culture.’ Cliff Slaughter, Bonfire of the Certainties: the Second Human Revolution (Morrisville, NC: Lulu, 2013),
p. xvi.
29
Bloch, Principle, vol. 1, p. 198.
30
Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 1375–1376.
 Critique 559
deprivation under capitalism. The arch-humanistic element in social revolution
finally removes the covering of self-alienation from all mankind.31
This indication of the social and cultural resources which aspire to a future of
freedom and contribute to the working class’s struggle for socialism is not limited
to what the Communist Manifesto calls intellectuals who comprehend the process
as a whole and go over to the proletariat. It calls up the work of creative artists –
writers, poets, painters, sculptors, architects, etc. – as well as innovative scientific
and technological researchers, learning that the fruits of their labours must belong
to a future in which they are shared and enjoyed by all humanity. They reach for
the future, into freedom, into beauty and truth.
Ernst Bloch clarified this truth, explaining that in painting (landscapes, portraits,
scenes of activity, etc.) and in poetry about experiences, dreams and situations –
‘in their extravagances and especially in their deeply inward- and outward-looking
realisms of possibility’ – is the search for utopia. And:
The specific pre-appearance which art shows is like a laboratory where events,
figures and characters are driven to their typical, characteristic end, as an
abysmal or a blissful end … [all this] presupposes possibility beyond already exist-
ing reality.32
There is no true humanity without this power of imagination.
In the same sense, as young people today more and more find their burning will to
freedom and a future open to the talents blocked by the commodification of every-
thing, including their own abilities, there will grow, inevitably, a feeling and an
understanding that the rule of capital offers them no future. Like those older
people who are already seen by the personifications of capital as ‘time’s carcase’ (a
‘problem’ because they are living too long), they are dispensable – in wars as well
as in the labour market. Under the rule of capital they are, and have been, nothing
more than embodiments of exploitable labour-time.
The struggles of women for equality, for emancipation from domestic slavery, for
an end to sexual dependence, treatment as mere sexual objects and abuse of all kinds,
have also in recent years come rapidly to represent a formidable force. They will now
increasingly coincide with the response of women and their particular human qual-
ities to the horrors of the unprecedented humanitarian crisis caused by the impera-
tives of globalised capital. The weapons and methods of modern warfare (warfare
consequent on competing capitalist powers’ uninhibited search for control of econ-
omic resources and geo-political-strategic territory) have their greatest impact on
women and children.
The same goes for the mass poverty in Africa and Asia, caused by centuries of colo-
nial exploitation and brutally intensified by the predations of imperialism, dictated by
giant international business corporations. The current systematic destruction of

31
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 1358.
32
eIbid., vol. 1, ‘Introduction’, loc.cit. above at note 26.
560 C. Slaughter
welfare-state provision in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries takes us in the same
direction and has the same impact. Given the particular sensibilities of women
(whether these qualities are regarded as inborn or the result of social conditioning
or both does not affect the argument here), it is sure that the empathy and fellow-
feeling so inseparable from the solidarity at the centre of socialist class-consciousness
makes the role of women in the social revolution essential.
This social revolution amounts to a process of the freeing of the human qualities of
human nature. It is in this sense that the fight for women’s emancipation is not an
adjunct to but an integral part of the social (as Marx says, ‘human’) revolution.
There had been advocates of sexual equality long before Marx. Thomas More
(1478–1535), author of Utopia (1516), for example, practised equal access to edu-
cation for girls and boys, and the socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837) wrote that
the extent of woman’s emancipation was a true measure of the progress of social
emancipation in general. Already, in his early twenties, Marx had incorporated
these insights into the giant step forward from all earlier philosophy he was embarked
on. The following passage is taken from his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844:
In the approach to woman as the spoil of communal lust is expressed the infinite
degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has
its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of
man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-
relationship is conceived. The direct, natural and necessary relation of person
to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship
man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation
to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In
this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable
fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to
which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relation-
ship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character
of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to
be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most
natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to
which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which his
human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the
extent to which man’s need has become a human need, the extent to which,
therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent
to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.33
(My emphasis, CS.)
While other writers had understood that the emancipation of women can be com-
pleted only in the social revolution which puts an end to class society, Marx here
shows that men too will be emancipated only when – in that social revolution –
the relationship between man and woman is ‘humanised’.

33
Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’ MECW, vol. 3, pp. 295–296.
 Critique 561
Part III: the proletariat and ‘the human revolution’
At first glance, Marx’s road to emancipation, revolution, in the 1840s had three
strands: philosophy, the proletariat, and humanism. How do these three come
together? In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, he wrote: ‘The head of this
emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat.’34 And in his Critical Marginal
Notes on the Article by a Prussian: ‘A philosophical people can find its corresponding
practice only in socialism, hence it is only in the proletariat that it can find the
dynamic element of its emancipation.’35
Why is the proletariat the ‘dynamic element’? For the simple reason that the pro-
letariat is the only class whose class interest is in socialism and the abolition of
capitalism. But this class is the mass of debased, deprived, forsaken beings. We
need to know why this is their condition … and why they must be revolutionary.
Capital has achieved the extreme of commodification by reducing the worker to
nothing more than the bearer of the commodity labour-power. The workers’
labour produces everything, and they have nothing. To what can they aspire? In
no way can they become a new ruling, exploiting class. If they are to remove
their dehumanisation, they must free themselves from the system which has
reduced the worker to nothing but ‘time’s carcase’. Their demand must be
freedom, in a classless society. They have nothing to lose but their chains!
The zero-point of most extreme alienation which the proletariat represents now at
last becomes the dialectical point of change. Marx teaches us to find our All pre-
cisely in the Nothing of this zero point. Alienation, dehumanisation, reification,
this Becoming- Commodity of all people and things, which in capitalism has to
an increasing extent brought with it: this, in Marx, is the old enemy which in capit-
alism, as capitalism, finally triumphed as never before.
Marx arrived at communism via his philosophical critique of Feuerbach and all
thereto existing materialism. Philosophy to be realised, needed its active or
dynamic element, the proletariat. The proletariat, to achieve its socialist mission,
needed the ideas Marx had derived from his work on philosophy. Firmly looking for-
wards, reaching for the free, classless society, it must liberate the repressed shoots of
that new society from the shackles of capital. This decision-making subjective factor is
allied to the objective economic material tendency determined by the social relations
of capitalist society. The understanding of the processes and contradictions of capit-
alism must be constantly developed together with the aspiration towards socialism.
Ernst Bloch was criticised for subjectivism and idealism by Stalinist apologists in
Eastern Europe after World War II and, more influentially amongst Marxist intel-
lectuals, by his own childhood friend but long-standing theoretical opponent,
Georg Lukács.36 Following his stand for humanist principles against the East

34
Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, MECW, vol. 3, p. 187.
35
Marx ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “the King of Prussia and Social Reform by a Prussian” (Vor-
wärts! no. 64), MECW, vol. 3, p. 202.
36
For earlier differences between Bloch and Lukács, see, for example, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2018 – edited collection
first published, 1977).
562 C. Slaughter
German regime in the late 1950s, Bloch was forced out of his chair at the University
of Leipzig, lost his distinguished role in the Academy of Sciences in Berlin and went
into exile at the West German university of Tübingen. But the truth – which it is
urgently relevant to recognise today – is that Ernst Bloch was a consistent materi-
alist and, like Marx, a thoroughgoing humanist. Since Marx himself, The Principle
of Hope was – and still is – the most thorough and complete exposition of this
standpoint.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Cliff Slaughter, brought up in a Communist Party family in Yorkshire, worked as a
coalminer as an alternative to military National Service, before graduating from
Cambridge University. He co-authored the classic Coal is Our Life with Norman
Dennis and Fernando Henriques, since when has written a number of books on
the working-class movement, socialism and Marxist theory, including Marxism,
Ideology and Literature, and, more recently, Not Without a Storm: towards a com-
munist manifesto for the age of globalisation and Bonfire of the Certainties: the
second human revolution, Against Capital: experiences of class struggle and rethink-
ing revolutionary agency. Now retired, he for many years taught social anthropology
and sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford. email:
vmitchell2@hotmail.co.uk