LITERATURE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE: LITERATURE AND MARXISM

d) The Constitution itself is not above particularities, but is a particularity more alongside others, only favorable to the strongest (which are not always the most rational)

 

e) The principles that govern the existence of States are not the demands of sacred reason, as Hegel intended, but the irrational facticities of power.

 

In short, Marx’s critique of Hegel focuses on three aspects: the conservatism of the phrase “Everything rational is real, everything real is rational; in the purely theoretical character of his philosophy; and in its conception of the State.

 

 

2.2. AGAINST FEUERBACH

 

Marx criticizes Feuerbach’s materialism. If Hegel reduces reality to idea, Feuerbach, thinker belonging to the Hegelian left, will reduce reality to matter, or what is the same, to Nature, of which man is a part. Marx criticizes this materialism as mechanistic, that is, to explain nature in terms of cause and effect, reducing it to the purely objective, and therefore, to man, who becomes a sensitive object inserted in the natural course, but not subject . The only mission of man is the contemplation of nature. Marx considers, instead, that the human being is better defined as a subject that transforms reality through praxis, considered also by him as matter, but with different connotations.

 

Another aspect that Marx criticizes is religious alienation. This criticism is concretized in two aspects. The first is that Feuerbach, according to Marx, does not consider man in his concrete individual aspect, but man in its maximum non-concrete generality: humanity. The second consists in the assertion that Feuerbach’s criticism of religious alienation is only a first moment. Feuerbach has not continued the work, has not delved into the phenomenon of alienation. Marx considers that at the basis of all alienation are the economic conditions in which a society develops. Feuerbach has lacked a historical, genetic and dialectical understanding of the phenomenon of alienation since, when the conditions and processes of alienation are discovered, one necessarily comes to the conclusion that a transformation of such structural (economic) conditions is necessary. to overcome alienation. Feuerbach is a theoretical philosopher, while Marx is theoretical-practical. Faced with the mere philosophical translation of Feuerbach’s world, Marx intends to worldize philosophy.

 

 

2.3. CRITICISM TO UTÓPICO SOCIALISM

 

Utopian socialism emerged as a critique of the incipient development of industrial society, whose immediate consequence was the emergence of a social class: the proletariat, subjected to a workday of more than twelve hours a day, in which children were not saved from These terrible living conditions. Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier proposed utopian solutions to solve social problems. But, according to Marx, these types of solutions are only a patch, the first thing to do is to know and consider the conditions of the economic structure that determine individual and social life, and then transform it. Marx argues that scientific socialism is based on exhaustive knowledge of the economic structure of capitalism, the structure that determines the ideological superstructure. Such knowledge allows us to project a communist transformation of society.

 

 

2.4 CRITICISM OF THE CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Adam Smith, Robert Malthus and David Ricardo are considered the thinkers of Classical Political Economy. In general, they have in common:

the idea of ​​the market self-regulated by the law of supply and demand.
the defense of state nonintervention in the economy.
the maximum reduction of the (unproductive) expenses of the State