The problem with Marx and his influence on the left

human-social christianity without personal transcendence

Abstract

Marx's philsophical-critical doctrine can be understood as a combination of three different layers of thought: 1) an interesting, still embrionary, practical materialism, secularizd and modern, to be reconstructed and developed in our times, in dialogue with acquisitions from contemporary pratical philosophy; 2) a basically schematic historical-dialectical materialism, dualistic, deterministic, crypto-normative, which looks a lot like an idealist philosophy of History, of which Marx's Critique of Capitalism is the decisive chapter – a substantialist materialism that could have been a better conversion of Hegel beyond his idealism and metaphysics; 3) a speculative, essentialist humanism, of our supposed generic essence, that adopts the Feuerbachian critique of Christianity as its strong normative principle, together with Christianity itself feuerbacheanly transmuted into a humanism that assumes, as our template and historical telos, the full realization of that essence. It is such a humanism that, for the dispair of marxists that obscurely perceive some of its absurdity, like Anthusser and his team, is never given up by Marx and later the critical theories, both traditional and renewed, explicitly of disguisedly derived from marxism, that is structurally consolidated by our communist philosopher in his critique of political economy as "determination by the level of essence", that of production, for him really social but masked behind the "real appearance" where all individual freedom and particularity are indeed just a structual illusion. Here we will be dealing more particularly with the third layer.