Abstract
This chapter discusses the recurrent project of establishing a Spinozan Marxism, understood as the effort to integrate Spinoza’s perspective within a Marxist conceptual framework. At the same time, the real discontinuities between the two thinkers are noted. With regard to Spinoza, his sharp polemic with the finalist doctrines of his time stood out. For Marx’s part, his objections to a certain kind of naturalism present in political economy are examined. Picking up from here, it is possible to contribute to the debate on a contemporary theory of emergence. Representatives of this theory—duly cited in the chapter—show us that more complex levels of being emerge from a natural base, yet can no longer be derived directly from that base (thus demanding appropriate categories for the new reality formed). The chapter ends by arguing that the complexity of our world requires a correct understanding of new emergent realities that cannot be viewed either in a naturalist mode, or as bearing a finalism within them. Articulating Spinoza’s thought with Marx offers consistent support for this approach.
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Notes
- 1.
The expression Spinozan Marxism can generate some misunderstandings, such as an incentive to deny Hegel’s contributions to Marxism (a posture with which I do not agree for the reasons presented in Chapter 2). That said, this expression has been used by some authors like Eugene Holland, among others. Cf. Eugene Holland, ‘Spinoza and Marx’, Cultural Logic 3 (1998): 1–17.
- 2.
Throughout this chapter, the texts and authors that are being introduced at this moment will be duly cited.
- 3.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), III, Preface, 491.
- 4.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1982), 273.
- 5.
John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 20.
- 6.
Kaan Kangal, ‘Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics’, Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (1 November 2020), https://monthlyreview.org/2020/11/01/engelss-emergentist-dialectics/.
- 7.
Gaston Bachelard, L’engagement rationaliste (Paris: PUF, 1972), 139–42.
- 8.
Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, IV, Appendix, 594.
- 9.
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Vorlesungen Über Die Geschichte Der Philosophie III’, in Werke, vol. 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 164.
- 10.
Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 2011.
- 11.
Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, IV, P. 4, 549.
- 12.
Ibid., III, Preface, 491.
- 13.
Ibid., III, Preface, 491. On the use of the category “man” (rather than, for example, men and women) by the classical authors analyzed here, see note 17 of Chapter 2.
- 14.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Political Treatise’, in Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 680.
- 15.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Theological-Political Treatise’, in Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 526–27.
- 16.
Ibid., 548.
- 17.
Ibid., 426.
- 18.
Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, I, P. 15, Schol., 424.
- 19.
Spinoza, ‘Political Treatise’, 690.
- 20.
Ibid., 690.
- 21.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Letter 50, Spinoza to Jelles [2 June 1674]’, in Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 891.
- 22.
Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 110, my emphasis.
- 23.
Marilena de Souza Chauí, Política em Espinosa (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 240, my emphasis.
- 24.
Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 154.
- 25.
Ibid., 155.
- 26.
Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in MECW, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 3.
- 27.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, in MECW, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 39.
- 28.
Marx, Capital, 273.
- 29.
György Lukács, Para Uma Ontologia do Ser Social, vol. 1 (São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2012), 289.
- 30.
Spinoza, ‘Ethics’ IV, P. 73, 587.
- 31.
Baruch Spinoza, ‘Letter 21, Spinoza to Blyenbergh [28 January 1665]’, in Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 822.
- 32.
Marx, Capital, 284, my emphasis.
- 33.
Marx and Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, 50. The word used in the text cited is the “discovery” (Entdeckung) of America. Contemporary historiography questions this expression, which creates the understanding that the American continent was an uninhabited desert before the arrival of the colonizers. But this just proviso does not affect the core of what is being discussed here.
- 34.
Marx, Capital, 929 (translation revised according to the German original).
- 35.
Chapter 4 of this book will present passages from Marx that rectify this idea of an “inexorability of a natural process” for human societies.
- 36.
Or, alternatively, immanent efficient causes, to emphasize that the effects produced are not external to them.
- 37.
“[…] all final causes are nothing but human fictions.” Spinoza, ‘Ethics’ I, Appendix, 442.
- 38.
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘The Philosophy of Spirit’, in Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6), ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 104.
- 39.
Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics (London: Merlin Press, 1975), 344–46.
- 40.
Jaegwon Kim, ‘Emergent Properties’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford University Press, 1995), 224.
- 41.
Zbigniew A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London: Macmillan and Company, 1967), 167.
- 42.
Although not the subject of this discussion, it is worth mentioning that in the Ontology he wrote late in life, Lukács formulates the relationship between nature and society in a very different way from History and Class Consciousness, the celebrated text of his youth.
- 43.
György Lukács, Para Uma Ontologia do Ser Social, vol. 2 (São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2013), 171–72.
- 44.
Ibid., 170.
- 45.
Due to space limitations, we restrict the analysis to the labor process, but Lukács also addresses the importance of language in this emergence of specifically human determinations.
- 46.
Lukács, Para Uma Ontologia do Ser Social, vol. 1, 186.
- 47.
Wolfgang Maar, ‘O Novo Objeto Do Mundo: Marx, Adorno e a Forma Valor’, Dois Pontos 13, no. 1 (April 2016): 29–44, 33.
- 48.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 110–12.
- 49.
Spinoza, ‘Ethics’ I, Appendix, 439.
- 50.
Here, it is important to recall that Spinoza has a broad concept of nature, which incorporates the field of human activity.
- 51.
G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Enzyklopädie Der Philosophischen Wissenschaften Im Grundrisse II’, in Werke, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 538.
- 52.
The classic passage from Spinoza on this topic can be found in Spinoza, ‘Ethics’, I, P. 28, 432–33.
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Vieira Martins, M. (2022). Toward a Theory of Emergence: Marx with Spinoza. In: Marx, Spinoza and Darwin. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13025-0_3
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