Classy

Marxist philosophy and social analysis are inseparable. For instance, at an abstract level, individuals experience the subjectivity of others, their personality and will, as an external force, as objective. But from the perspective of Marx's materialism, an individual’s subjectivity is conditioned by their (objective) position within a (constantly developing) social structure. Individuals in the social group bring different aspects of the group experience to its collective subjectivity, in this way enriching it, concretising it, producing diversity within unity. At the same time, the group’s sense of itself, borne of objective socio-economic conditions, is reinforced, as if from the outside, by active social, economic and political differences with the groups whose position in the socio-economic structure, whose economic and political interests, whose class subjectivity put them in opposition to the first. This isn’t just the picture at the macro level, but also within classes—explaining, for example, the unity and divergence of the interests of industrial and financial capital, depending on the circumstances.

But Marxist philosophy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea—not least because its origins in a peculiar type of north European mysticism must render it pretty difficult to grasp without specialist training. Marx’s main, strictly philosophical innovation was probably his fusion of Hegelian dialectics with the mechanical materialism of the Enlightenment, via Feuerbach. From the 1850s his main innovation in social science was probably an adaptation of this to some of the most useful methods and approaches of positivism, while at the same time keeping a strong critical distance to it. But after about 1845, his thought, although evolving, bore the stamp of "materialist dialectics" right up until the end. This approach allows Marx to be both a propagandist for the working class and to try to take a scientific (that is, systematic) approach. An attempt at “objective study” does not rule out consideration of objective and subjective social factors in looking at the outcome of an historical or political process, which is the basic method of any historical materialist analysis. By "objective study", in this context, KM probably means “disinterested, unemotional, detached, unsentimental”. How else could the cause of the working class, which for him was the same as the cause of human liberation, hope to progress otherwise?

One reason that socialists have tended to be keen on philosophy is in order to help to avoid muddle-headed, misfiring arguments. Another reason is that we are interested on the search for the truth about the nature of human life. One aspects of historical materialism, which has built into it an understanding of the social and material limitations and potential of group political action–seeing their inter-relation as a process that takes place at multiple levels of social reality, from the macro down to the micro–is that both the limitations on social development and the potential for social development (and also so socialism) are constantly being reproduced, augmented and extended by capitalist economic processes. However, it never conceives  social progress as automatic, but always as an active political process by which the rising class prepares itself with the skills for future political rule. That is, it has clear objective and subjective aspects, which are relational categories, so that something that is a subjective factor in one context, seen from another perspective, in another relation,  is best understood as objective force or factor.