SPIRIT IS A BONE

Convinced you haven't understood the thesis as it was meant. Understanding comes from change. Therefore, change is a process of understanding. The formulation of change is by this a process of change itself. The distinction between idealism and materialism as it appears can be made clear on this ground

No, not at all. That's not what thesis 11 is saying. It's about the purpose of philosophy, which has always, even for Marx in his own practice, a standing back from practice to try to see what really is. Capital served this very function, as a science it gives no direction to people from within other than what it hints is possible from capital, but not what we should do.

The closest to what you say is thesis 2 which has to do with the criterion of truth for Marx, practice. The truth is proven by how far our theories allow us to change the world. This criterion of truth, however, is not truth at all since it just eternally undoes itself.

It's about the point of philosophy. Not the purpose.

subjective or objective to itself ?

There is no distinction between "point" and "purpose" that I can discern.

che was the cutest revolutionary

Hence thesis 3 and five.

"[…] circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself."

"Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity."

Maybe Feuerbach was an idiot (I doubt it now tbh, Marx is famous for misreading almost everyone he critiqued), but at least the educator bit is not contested by Hegel, who wrote the fucking Phenomenology, you know, the book about the forms we've thought in and learned to build on and against to reach a modern understanding.

Thesis 5, I will admit, I have no immediate clue about. I don't know what he's even critiquing. That Feuerbach thought human practice only as thought and not as sensuous activity? Because Hegel did consider both human, but thought as the highest aspect of human practice.

That 'thought' occurs "only in the form of the object or of contemplation". Hence the basis for the claim to a distinction to be read between: "but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively" and "human activity itself as objective activity".

This forms the basis for a criticism which occurs at some point in Marx's writings where he claims Hegel has only discovered, and I'm paraphrasing, an abstract mode of history.

A particularity of this criticism also occurs within the manuscripts (the final sentences of this quote). After reading it, you can see the total transformation if you reread thesis 1. Thus the shape of materialism.

"The first emerges most clearly in the Phänomenologie, the birth-place of the Hegelian philosophy. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts … They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their presumption of reality. The philosopher – who is himself an abstract form of estranged man – takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation process [Entäußerungsgeschichte] and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) ||XVII|[45] thought – of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, [Entfremdung] which therefore forms the real interest of the transcendence [Aufhebung] of this alienation [Entäußerung], is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject – that is to say, it is the opposition between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness within thought itself. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself [selbst sich vergegenständlicht] in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of the estrangement [Entfremdung] and the thing to be superseded [aufzuhebende]."

I think there's more to Marx than you yourself know.

Taken from

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm

I couldn't find the quote I wanted, but Marx's readings of Hegel are interesting. Also, Capital should be understood as a process of critique; its original title is essential to its understanding - A critique of political economy. The shape played in its elaboration reveals the broader method of Marx's thinking for science as practice. Thus, thought as sensuous activity.

Found it

"But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only the act of creation, the history of the origin of man."

My translated copy was a bit different to the one on the site

Marx had valuable and genuine insights beyond Hegel, however his misunderstanding of Hegel is undeniable if one studies Hegel in his own right. I need more context to get a better understanding of what Marx is aiming to mean in that paragraph because that is not the sense i get from Hegel's phenomenology at all. The Phenomenology is not at heart about alienation, it is about a misguided and vexing problem of the presupposition of natural consciousness: that there is a separation between object and subject which in the form of self-consciousness becomes object and essence which constitutes the form of knowledge or way of relating to the world. Absolute Knowing is nothing but the realization that this distinction is one made by Spirit (human society and individuals), a presupposition no one has ever had a real reason to make and thus why we should investigate Logic in order to know just what the hell our metaphysical presuppositions actually mean. You can't just claim "it's materialism, duh". And this is precisely what Marx claims. Is it self-evident? From one perspective, yeah, but that doesn't explain anything, as a matter of fact it ends up meaning nothing at all. Marx's "materialism" ends up having nothing to do with materialism, it always only was historical materialism, meaning that the history of human society (Spirit) has always been a reflection of its material modes of production and relations of production. It's simply a dogmatic assumption that throughout his life vacillates between dogmatic mechanistic determinism and relativistic open indeterminism, a mere dogmatic reflection of Hegel's own Phenomenology's forms of consciousness. The Phenomenology is not a theory of history, and Hegel's actual theory of history can be read a multiple different ways, some far more charitable than others, and a few in no direct contradiction to Marx's materialism.

I don't deny that Hegel did think of human history in abstraction, failing to enter into it with the concretion Marx did, but that quote also requires more context for me to get a sense of just what he is critiquing. Hegel's Logic is just that: a general logic, so of course it is itself abstract since it is merely thought of thought, not thought of anything empirical.

I'm convinced about Cyrill Smith's reading of Marx as anti-philosophical, and thus his use of Hegel in Capital is, as you pointed out, a negative one for the sake of showing that it all comes crashing down at the end since the entire system is an unstable contradiction from beginning to end. Marx's dialectics are all negative, all are fictions we have deluded ourselves into. This, however, undermines Marx's own theories as well. Hegel wanted to know what the form of a necessarily true theory would look like, the Logic's project, and then attempted to flesh that out. Marx, while taking Hegel's fluidity in part, is unwilling to give up his own prejudice and presupposition in order to set out an explicitly political program from what he himself admitted was a position against the views of philosophy as such, and staunchly concretely particular rather than abstractly universal. I don't think less of Marx for his philosophical dogmatism, but I think people highly misjudge just how far his thought extends. Likewise, people highly misjudge just how useful Hegel is for understanding the limits of not just Marx and himself, but ourselves.

The neo-Marxist critique of Marx as not giving the realm of thought, ideology, a significant enough role as a determinant of the material world. Humans do not merely reflect their material being, they have made their being reflect their abstract being as well.

I may have completely missed what you meant, let me know.

bump