The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Luka´cs and Antonio Negri

Abstract

Ontology, the theory of being, its logic and categories, is a form of thought that is not generally compatible with Marxism, at least not in an affirmative mode. On the contrary, Marxist analysis almost always takes ontology as the target of ideology critique. Indeed, Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach has often been taken as a wholesale negation of ontology or metaphysics in both its idealist and materialist forms, a demonstration of its deceptive contemplative quietism, the practical effect of which is to provide social exploitation with a theoretical, or even theological, alibi: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (Marx and Engels, 1998, p. 571). Thus, Marx apparently felt that his own thought was not philosophy because it was not a metaphysical ideology but a critical practice, and thus he was not a philosopher but a theoretically sophisticated militant. Many Marxists seem to accept these distinctions without a second thought. Take Herbert Marcuse: "Once critical theory had recognized the responsibility of economic conditions for the totality of the established world and comprehended the social framework in which reality was organized, philosophy became superfluous as an independent scientific discipline dealing with the structure of reality" (Marcuse, 1968, p. 134).2 Leaving aside the vexed issue of Engels' "dialectics of nature" and its legacy, let's look at the most influential thinkers of western Marxism: among them, the only figures who seek explicitly to rehabilitate the form and construct a specifically Marxist ontology are Georg Luka´cs, who does so only at the very end of his life, in the period following The Destruction of Reason that has rarely been taken seriously by western Marxist analysts, and Antonio Negri, who has been laying out the contours of his "post-deconstructive ontology" for the past two decades without inciting much noticeable reaction among his comrades.