Young Marx - Criticisms

Criticisms

Marxist humanists do not argue that Marx's thought never developed but criticise the dichotomy presented ‘young’ and ‘mature’ as being too rigid and not recognising the continuity in Marx‘s development. One piece of evidence used by Marxist humanist to highlight the importance of Marx's early works is that Marx himself in 1851 tried to have two volumes of his early writings published.

François Châtelet denied the existence of a rupture in 1857 between the young Marx and a mature Marx who would have discarded his errors and assume "mastery of his thought." Instead, he considered that the tensions in his thought continued on until his death in 1883. This thesis, concentrating itself on the tensions in Marx's thought instead of an alleged maturity of his thought, would also be upheld by Étienne Balibar (1993).

Others contended that Althusser's "epistemological break" between The Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and The German Ideology (1845), in which some new concepts are forged, is a bit too abrupt, although almost no one contests the radical shifts. In fact, though Althusser steadfastly held onto the claim of its existence, he later asserted that the turning point's occurrence around 1845 was not so clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism and Hegelianism were to be found in Capital. He even went so far as to state that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and some notes on a book by Adolph Wagner were fully free from humanist ideology. In fact, Althusser considered the epistemological break to be a process instead of a clearly defined event, the product of the incessant struggle against ideology: Althusser believed in the existence of class struggle in theory itself. This struggle marked the division point between those philosophers who contented themselves with providing various ideological "interpretations" of the world and those who endeavoured to "transform" the world, as Marx had put it in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845).

Furthermore, other important shifts in Marx's thought have been highlighted (e.g. Étienne Balibar), in particular following the failure of the 1848 revolutions, in particular in France with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851 coup d'état, and then after the crush of the 1871 Paris Commune. This would lead him to substitute, in the first chapter of Das Kapital (1867), his theory of commodity fetishism for the theory of alienation expounded in the 1844 Manuscripts.