Marx on True v. Vulgar Criticism

I like this passage from Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law:"

Hegel's chief error is to conceive the contradiction of appearances as unity in essence, in the idea, while in fact it has something more profound for its essence, namely, an essential contradiction ... Vulgar criticism falls into an opposite, dogmatic error. Thus it criticises the constitution, for example. It draws attention to the antagonism of the powers, etc. It finds contradictions everywhere. This is still dogmatic criticism which fights with its subject-matter in the same way in which formerly the dogma of the Holy Trinity, say, was demolished by the contradiction of one and three. True criticism, by contrast, shows the inner genesis of the Holy Trinity in the human brain. It describes the act of its birth. So the truly philosophical criticism of the present state constitution not only shows up contradictions as existing; it explains them, it comprehends their genesis, their necessity." 

So, Hegel's error is a belief that the modern state/republican constitution only appears to contain contradictions, when in fact its essence is a united idea. (That is itself a very confusing thought which I will not attempt to unpack here).

There are two ways of criticizing Hegel. There is vulgar criticism, which consists in attempting to point out logical contradictions in Hegel's philosophy. And then there is true criticism, which attempts to discover the absurd conditions that could give rise to such a contradictory belief in the first place. (cf. my previous post on this).

This is a nice statement of Marx's method. As he says in the "Theses on Feuerbach:"

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in its practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice. 

These two passages rely on similar examples. In the first quotation, Hegel still seems somewhat Feuerbachian. He is content to uncover the mental sources of our contradictory beliefs. Philosophy is a great act of unmasking. It reveals the sort of mental distortions necessary to produce religious projections.

The revolutionary Marx of the "Theses" goes further. Intellectual unmasking is not enough. The crucial task of philosophy is to revolutionize the material conditions themselves responsible for these contradictions in thought to emerge. It is not enough to go around lecturing religious people (Dawkins style) about how it is that they've come to believe such silly things. What is needed is a revolution in the material conditions that gave rise to those silly religious imaginations in the first place.

A third striking statement of Marx's method comes from his famous letter to Arnold Ruge. (The letter famous for Marx describing himself as engaged in the "ruthless criticism of the existing order"). As he constantly does, Marx criticizes socialists who purport to have discovered an ideal of justice, and who wish to reform society to fit their ideal:

Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e., from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.

Again, we have here a Feuerbachian Marx. The goal is "self-clarification." By helping those engaged in revolutionary politics understand their existing, objective situation, the philosopher will contribute to the revolutionary struggle. This is different, Marx insists, from confronting the revolutionary class with some abstract, dogmatic theory of justice. The revolutionary consciousness will emerge from revolutionary politics itself.

And finally, consider this famous statement of the method from the Manifesto:

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.