The Principles of Anarcho-Historical-Relativism

This refers to Michel Luc Bellamare’s https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/the-limits-and-deficiencies-of-dialectical-and-historical-materialism/

• “No matter how much Marx claims otherwise and continuously stresses the objectivity of materiality as ‘a priori’ and ‘prima causa’ for all ideas, perceptions and consciousness,  dialectical-historical-materialism always resorts to language, philosophy and concepts in order to elucidate its principles, its conclusions, and, in addition, in order to validate its fundamental premises.” — MBellamare

To a scientist, this is a non-scientist’s take.

A practising scientist daily works with, participates in, and contributes to, science that quite obviously “resorts to language and concepts in order to elucidate its principles and conclusions, and to validate its fundamental premises”.

Only a non-scientist would stake his philosophical reputation on the ‘discovery’ that scientist Marx — even after he had cut his teeth on ‘master’ thinker Hegel — was unable to recognise that science is expressed in thought.

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So what makes MBellamare’s ‘discovery’ crazy?

For Marx, objectivity of concepts depends on the nature of the concepts: whether or not they grounded in practical sensuous phenomena.

• If a scientist investigates frogs, he/she works with the frogs, or data about the frogs, or theories synthesised from analysis of data about the frogs, or all three together, and he/she never doubts the direct objectivity of the sensuous phenomenon of the “frogs” under investigation nor the indirect objectivity of the theoretical concept of “frogs” he/she constructs synthetically.

  This corresponds to Marx’s method in Capital, where he calls it the “only true scientific method”.

• If a philosopher investigates concepts that lack a synthetic connection to sensuous phenomena and he/she synthesises from them new conceptions about sensuous phenomena, the objectivity of the new conceptions and his/her synthetic method remain open to doubt and challenge, because conceptions ungrounded in sensuous human practice lack credible objectivity.

  The derivation of the sensuous out of the non-sensuous is what Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach calls ‘scholasticism’ and in Capital calls ‘mysticism’.

Deriving the sensuous from the non-sensuous is all that one can do if one is trapped within the philosophical mindset.  The young Marx fought his way through Hegel, and found his way out of that all-powerful philosophical prison in his Theses on Feuerbach, where he discovers the objectivity of sensuous phenomena to reside, not in human thinking, but in human practice:

• sensuousness is practical, human-sensuous activity

• practical, human-sensuous activity is objective

• objective truth is a practical question,

• All social life is essentially practical.

After this ground-breaking discovery, that once and for all dashed the idealist hope that non-sensuous thought could engender objective sensuous phenomena, Marx moved beyond non-sensuous conceptualisation to henceforth always derive non-sensuous conceptions by synthesis of the abstract analysis of objective sensuous human practice.

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That is why Marx considered himself a materialist.

And that is why those who would still perfect the idealist miracle of engendering the sensuous from the non-sensuous are so hostile to Marx, while they remain imprisoned in the philosophical trap where scholasticism holds sway.