Epistemology was a preoccupation of Karl Marx from his earliest writings, and it has been a preoccupation of Marxists ever since. While epistemology is understood philosophically to refer to “the theory of knowledge,” and most often as the conceptualization of what constitutes “truth” or at least the justification for apparently organized thoughts, in Marxism, as in most other philosophical and scientific traditions, there are too many strands or variants to permit a single concept of what counts as a “theory of knowledge.” Likewise, there are a variety of putatively Marxist positions regarding the veracity of any knowledge claim and/or its disciplined, organized exposition. It is indeed possible to pluralize, so as to speak about different Marxist or Marx-inspired “theories of knowledge.” But, in this entry, we focus less on epistemology as the ascertainment of theoretical truth and more as a general questioning about knowledge. This questioning inquires into the object of knowledge (the known); the “subject” of knowledge (the knower); its form and content; the social processes or practices through which knowledge is produced (or, in a different language, its “causes”); and its manifold, reverberating effects.
What is to be known? What do Marxists take as the object(s) of a knowledge production process? Marxists have generally agreed that the material world, and especially that which is created or transformed by human effort or labor, is the primary—perhaps the only proper—object of knowledge. François Laruelle (2015, 5) comments that the different elements of the material world that Marxism takes as an object, from “nature” to the mode of production, are always assumed to have a certain universality. There are some Marxists who follow Friedrich Engels’s resolute attempt (1940) to establish a broad-ranging, universal “dialectics of nature.” Toward this end, Engels pursues Marx’s famous, self-proclaimed inversion of Hegel’s dialectics of the unfolding through time of Reason or The Idea (Marx 1977, 103), and Engels projects it into the realm of the natural world, as both Marx and he understood it vis-à-vis an avid familiarity with the natural sciences of their time. Marx and Engels regarded their dialectical materialism—separately and together—as enabling them to see homologies between their own “scientific” work and that of the established methodological, material practices in chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and more. They believed that their dialectical method was the principal means of constructing an epistemological position and a practice of truth-seeking about the economic and class structure of capitalism. Engels thought that dialectical elements of knowledge-building might be extended to these “hard” sciences as well. Thus, for example, in both Anti-Dühring (1934) and the Dialectics of Nature (1940), Engels applies to “nature” an epistemological stance first announced by Marx. For Marx, basic Hegelian conceptions of cause, effect, movement, and trajectory—for example the transformation of quantity into quality (1977, 423) or “the negation of the negation” (1977, 929)—can be employed to grasp the complexity of the materially grounded (capitalist) social world (Ollman 1992). Engels, following Marx’s hints on the topic, calls for a unification of theory about theory (or knowledge about knowledge), denoted by and deployed through the application of a universal method of experimentation. This method, in his view, would facilitate the formulation of truths about the experienced, material world. Lenin (1927) would later authorize this same stance regarding Marx’s scientific method.
Yet, Marx’s own materialist epistemological position—which engaged with, but also sharpened itself against, Hegel’s “idealism” and Feuerbach’s incomplete, abstract, universalizing materialism (see also Lenin 1977)—prioritized the tasks of exposing, excavating, and/or uncovering the generalizable realities of human production and reproduction, and not all “nature” per se. As Marx opens his notebooks (the Grundrisse) in preparing Capital: “The object before us, to begin with, material production” (1973, 83). In the processes of material production and reproduction, humans make and remake themselves (Marx 1964), though not in a manner of their direct choosing or independent will, as Marx (1971, 20) warns us. Marx comments periodically in his writings on the nature of nature, or, rather, the sundry forms of differentiated material existence—inert or vital—that we presume exist prior to, independent from, and/or “outside” of human endeavors. This mute nature, though, can be apprehended and, often, bent—sometimes with great resistance—to human purposes through the application of intellectual and manual labor (see Sohn-Rethel’s [1978] Marxist distinction between the labors). As Marx states in the Grundrisse, “nature builds no machines” (1973, 706); instead, machinery, electrical energy, all technologies of converting or concentrating natural power, are “organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: the power of knowledge objectified.” Stiegler (2015) calls Marx’s analysis here an “organology of knowledge” (135).
Importantly, Marx criticizes naturalizing social processes and attributing the qualities and capacities of human energy and labor-induced sweat to “things.” As Marx argues in the first chapter of Capital, under capitalism, things are mainly, but not exclusively, equated to or are stamped from their birth as commodities. As a privileged object of knowledge, things live vexed lives, and in different schools of Marxian thought, knowledge of their troubled existence is interpreted dissimilarly. Some, like Georg Lukács (1971), perceive the job of Marx’s knowledge-producing historical materialism to be meticulously unearthing the truth—though a complex dialectical method consisting of “mediations”—about the curious thingness of capitalist social life. This social life is covered over by and buried within deep strata of dense mystification and a pervasive “false consciousness”: an ideological mindset that Marx linked to what he termed the “fetishism of commodities” (Marx 1977, 163–177; Cole 2014 argues that Hegel was Marx’s primary inspiration for this discussion). Further inspired by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others identified as the “Frankfurt School” (Arato and Gephardt 1982), contemporary Marxists have followed this Lukácsian demystificatory line of thought to describe and also condemn the capitalist “cultural industries” that proliferate commodity fetishism in all its many guises and make true knowledge of capitalism difficult at best.
For many Marxists, commodification breeds illusion, artifice, and deceit; it hides from view the real social relations of exploitative labor and production that are its source. Demystification—de-reification—puts things right in the sphere of knowledge, as capitalist commodities ultimately can be viewed as carriers of labor-produced and -denominated value (Bewes 2002). True, and potentially revolutionary, knowledge admits that commodified things have social effects but it insists on social causation that puts labor first and the results of that labor after. As Marx argued, the lived ideology of commodity fetishism “inverts” that causation, and it is a primary goal of Marxian political economy to stand this perceived chain of determination on its head. Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, from this standpoint, shows the “real abstraction” (Finelli 1989, Toscano 2008) that stands behind the concrete “use values” that are created with exchange—and exchange-value—in mind. To many Marxists, the objective of distinctively Marxian knowledge production is to move from one-sided, depthless abstraction to the many-sided, stratiform concrete, which, in capitalism, is the “real world” of commodity relations, a material universe structured first and foremost by class-exploiting productive activity.
Yet, in recent years, “thingness” has been reconceived such that, after all, commodities are themselves thought to have a “social life.” Following the work of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986), some Marxists and related theorists (Lamb 2011, Freedgood 2006, Brown 2004) have opened up inquiries into the coming in and out of the commodity chain or circuits—or playing multiple roles within one circuit—which suggests that “knowing commodities” and the labor processes that give rise to and are imbued as value within them is more complicated than the portrait painted in “commodity fetishism.” Even more recently, theorists associated with what is known as “object-oriented ontology” (Harman 2011, Bogost 2012) or “speculative realism” (Meillasoux 2008, Gratton 2014) have pushed “taking things seriously” even further. For speculative realists and “vibrant materialists,” knowledge is an imposition and a mistake if it treats things as silent and also only effective and experiential if humans act on them or set them in motion; all ontology and epistemology after Kant is “anthropocentric” (Bennett 2010, Coole and Frost 2010). Things are only seen from the standpoint of human praxis. A promising engagement may soon arise (see Bennett 2015 for some opening thoughts) between Marxists dedicated to human-centered materialist epistemology—seeing knowledge as deriving from and directed by human manual and mental labor—and “speculative realists.”
In the pursuit of knowledge of the concrete-real, many Marxists read things strategically or “symptomatically” for what these objects essentially connote. And what things connote (other than the objects found in untouched nature) is the process of production through which they were first brought into being and/or altered. Items that persist through time are the consequence of past labor expended. The things of the past can be studied directly for clues about their original constitution, and this study is often archival or archaeological in character.
The “reading” involved in comparing purportedly mute objects still in existence with documentation about the conditions under which they were produced is, at bottom, an archaeological practice. This knowledge-producing practice can be understood in the Foucauldean sense of genealogical work. Indeed, many Marxists from the 1960s on have reread Marx’s epistemological positions through Michel Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge” (1972, 1997; see also Barrett 1991, Montag 1995, Escobar 2011, Ryder 2013). These readings emphasize the importance of epistemological ruptures, moments in which the norms of ascertaining and justifying “truth” shift irrevocably. And this idea of shifting truth norms is likewise true for Marxists who, sometimes as an alternative to the more Continental philosophic language that one finds in Foucault, turn to the notions of “paradigm shifts” and scientific revolutions promoted by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, or to Paul Feyerabend’s view (1975, Bhaskar 1975) that the history and practice of science defy codification in particular methodological rules or consistently practiced transdiscursive norms of knowledge creation.
An archaeological knowledge-producing process can also refer to the specific disciplinary practice of archaeological digs, the interpretation of which involves discovering and deciphering grids of in situ natural objects (including previous life) or wholly fashioned, human-produced things: artifacts. Indeed, there is a field of Marxist archaeology (among others, see Saitta 1994, 2005, McGuire 1992, Childe 1936) in which unearthed things are read dynamically through thick interpretations of the class-inflected strata that surround and include these human-made artifacts.
While Marxist knowledge production has the material world, and frequently the sub-realm of manufactured things, as its primary object (Castree 1995), Marx hammers away about the impact ideas and ideation have on concrete social relations—while simultaneously locating ideas and their production within the realm of the real (Kain 1986). Marx rails against the supposed realm of “pure thought” (Marx and Engels 1970, 39). Indeed, ideas arise and are transmitted materially. They can only be voiced, heard, shared, written, and so on via concrete human activity and with the aid of associated labor-produced technologies. Without ideation (in the Grundrisse [1973, 101] Marx refers to the “thinking head”), the world would remain mute, echoless and meaningless to humans, and this despite our tactile experience of it. Subjecting idealist conceptions about the thought process to an all-encompassing, unyielding (“ruthless”) critique will show, in the “last instance,” that talkers and listeners are all engaged in the labor of discourse. And it is through such discourse that they configure “the real” in thought—although, of course, to Marx this configuration can predictably be done wrong.
Marx’s critique of “idealism” as a false or mistaken epistemological stance can be found in his discussions, scattered throughout his writings, about demystification. In these passages, Marx specifically exposes the “ghost-walk” (Marx 1972, 830) of the “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world” (830) that is imagined by political economists within bourgeois society. In Marx’s view, classical political economy only partially defuses, and too often abets, this mystification; in its inconsistencies and frequent theoretical errors, it too is haunted by the “bourgeois standpoint” (830).
The “mature” Marx’s description in Capital of the fog of exchange that characterizes commodity fetishism—capital’s prevalent ideological mystification—can be referred back to his earlier attacks on universalist and dematerialized dogmas of all kinds, and that includes incipient forms of socialist thought. His insistence on dialectical materialism as a method for producing verifiable truth is also an attempt to heal an imagined rift, a disjunction, within knowledge and the known. On one side of this divide stands the “real world,” as it is realized at a moment in time and created by human labor. On the other stands a mist-enwrapped world of pure or “abstract” ideas, transcendent across time and place, though often enough directing historical human (and super-human) events and destinies. The role of Marxism (at least among its schools that perceive this division) is to reveal the underlying truth of existing social relations. In this sense, Marxism is a knowledge machine, a means of production in the “thought-concrete,” through which the historically based truth of human productive relations—with its focus on class and the violent constitution and rending of each epoch’s social fabric (a violence unleashed primarily on the bodies of workers)—is laid bare. The truth may yet set us free.
For some, Marxism’s epistemological stance is derived directly from the experiences of workers in capitalism who, for perhaps the first time for laborers down through many class-divided millennia (or at least since humans’ “original” communal existence), are capable of shedding ideological untruths, and who can fully grasp the basis of social life via their shared thinking as a class “for itself.” For others, though, Marxism delineates a practice of knowledge production that is not merely descriptive or simply a mirror, or the instinctual experience, of a preferred class “the subject of history.” In this view, Marxism is primarily a disciplined, formal discourse available to all, but featuring labor and laboring as the points of departure, transit, and arrival, that weaves itself in thought through a multiplicity of contradictions and “overdeterminations.”
One influential version of Marxism as a disciplined and disciplining (in the sense of providing an intellectual order over disparate thoughts), overdetermined discourse was developed by the Marxian political economists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff. Their work (1987) introduces the idea that Marxism, like other formal discourses, has an entry point through which its theoretical practitioners may construct an unparalleled knowledge. For Resnick and Wolff, Marxism’s distinctive epistemological stance and its particular discursive “truths” result from “entering” discourse about the social world through its likewise distinctive concept of class. To “know” as a Marxist, therefore, is to know from the standpoint of class, in this case meaning to have “begun” one’s investigation into the understanding of all things through the conscious utilization of class as an entry point, which also then serves as a guide and an end point. This notion of standpoint or entry point shares much in common with feminist epistemology (see Harding 1993, Smith 2004, Bakan 2012, Anderson 2015); likewise, black Marxist approaches (Robinson 2000, Kelley 2003), critical of the dominant white or Eurocentric Marxian voices, enter social theory with a proclaimed epistemological standpoint of either the intersection of race and class, or of race predominating (see also Young 2004).
For Marxists adopting Resnick and Wolff’s view, class as entry point does not imply that all things—all social and economic processes—are manifestations or direct effects of class (see also Cullenberg 1996). It is merely (and strongly) that a distinctively Marxian knowledge about the world asks and answers questions through the lens of class—admittedly, one lens among many that social theorists may choose from (and, of course, that may choose them).
Turning to the “subject of knowledge,” in The German Ideology (1970), Marx and Engels describe a human knower—a conscious, thinking being—as a product of the real historical moments of their lives. And, so, humans make history and seek and create knowledge through the practice of their labor. Marx’s writings are replete with acknowledgements that humans produce knowledge, and that knowledge, in turn, as part of their conditions of existence, however “superstructural,” partly produces them. So, at first blush, it might appear that Marx starts and stops with real, sensuous human individuals, joining together to create their material existence, and from there, humanity in general, as “the subject of knowledge,” that is, the knower (or knowers) in epistemological inquiry. Though an advancement on Feuerbach, Marx might be thought, like his portrayal of Feuerbach, to regard knowledge “abstractly” rather than concretely.
But as many Marxian theorists since his time have remarked, Marx is a partisan, and his perspective on knowledge production, his epistemological stance, positions laborers—as a class, and only thereby individually—as possessing the ability to know the tangible world concretely, uniquely, and specifically (some would say “correctly”) through their many acts of material production and their chronologically conjoint exploitation. Thus, workers are privileged by their labor, and their actual and potential knowledge of the forces and relations of production, to see the social world as a whole and their position within it. Some Marxists have gone so far as to advocate the exclusive veracity of “proletarian science,” science that espies all material existence as corresponding to and stemming from the peculiar viewpoint of the proletariat or, relatedly, a suitably revolutionized peasantry (see Dominique Lecourt’s superb 1977 study of Lysenkoism for a critique of one version of this tendency). Indeed, Marxists have often put forward the claim that no previous working class in history has been as propitiously positioned, by the sequence of all previous revolutionary transitions, such that they could consciously comprehend correctly and act upon an extant class-constituted social formation (Azad 2005). In this view, the proletariat is always capable of apprehending the totality of relations pertaining to their historical time and place. They can “know” the material world and the historical forces that gave rise to it like no other class in history.
Other contemporary offshoots of Marxism, like Stiegler (2010), come to the alternative conclusion that proletarianization—through the deskilling processes that Marx describes in Capital, the transfer of workers’ knowledge to machines—is a process of losing knowledge, especially individual “know-how.” Yet, though Frederick Taylor once described industrial workers “unfortunately” as “trained gorillas,” Antonio Gramsci posited that these workers,
have understood that ‘trained gorilla’ is just a phrase, that. . .the worker remains a man and even that during his work he thinks more, or at least has greater opportunities for thinking, once he has overcome the crisis of adaptation without being eliminated ... not only does the worker think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from conformist.
(Gramsci 1988, 295)
Marxists, from one standpoint, see the subject of knowledge to be the subject of history (Holland 1998 refers to this as Marx’s “transcendental subjectivism”), and it is only from this privileged perch that knowledge can shake off its abstract philosophical (metaphysical) entrapment and, instead, become full, reliable, and liberatory. Yet, for some, the self-consciousness that workers are capable of possessing and utilizing in their quest to know the material world and the exploitative social relations under which they toil is not spontaneous. Nor is it capable of being spread throughout the working class or all society without the guidance of Marxism itself. In fact, Marx often ridicules the notion that thinkers, including proletarian autodidacts and self-conscious revolutionaries, can instruct the world to simply “open its jaws to let the roast partridges of absolute science fly into its mouth” (Marx 1978, 13). Instead, Marx’s writings ensconce intellectual production based upon a dialectical materialist approach as constituting a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of existence for worker self-consciousness to break through and become scientific knowledge.
If producing class knowledge is the objective of Marxism, then the exploited class—in capitalism, wage workers engaged in “productive” labor, along with their non-working class allies and advocates—is the primary “knower” of concern of a Marxist epistemology. Epistemology, like all other theoretical discourses, is a battleground of competing ideas, and what distinguishes the standpoint from which “truths” are judged adequate or not to the concrete-real is the position within a broader class struggle that each standpoint actualizes. This is different from another Marxist view according to which there is a close correspondence among historical subjects, their class positions, and their ideas. In an alternative perspective, it is not the subjects themselves, imagined as seamless and contradiction-less wholes, who are the possessors of an advantaged, class-based knowledge. It is more that subjects, including productive laborers, are themselves (in)determined (there is always a subjective “lack” eluding complete closure) by class and other social and natural processes.
And, so, it is this complex positioning that takes the form of temporary, in flux, articulated subjective “unities”—one might say that the subject of knowledge is thus “decentered”—and this often-fragile, eradicable articulation affects any knower’s ability to discern relative, class-modulated truths (it is into such an articulated space of decentered political subjects that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe 1985 interject the Gramscian analytic of “hegemony”). Indeed, within Marxian schools, there has long been an interest in problematizing “the subject” based on an engagement with Freudian psychoanalytic theory. And this questioning of the cohesion or coherence of subjects, especially under capitalism, has had implications for the way knowledge is constructed and disseminated by such inherently conflicted subjects (Eyers 2015). If subjectivity, or better, subjectivation—suturing the many gaps and fissures of subjects—is always a psychic balancing act, which also consistently fails, then it is unclear what kind of knowledge can emanate from or interject into any knowing agent. What becomes of the Nietzschean “will to know” when subjects are enslaved, often joyfully, to their passions and when their passions are chained to their slavery (Lordon 2014)? In recent years, there has been a school of Marxism that considers questions of agency and psychical balance from the standpoint of the French Freudian theorist Jacques Lacan (see Žižek 1989, 1997, Copjek 1994, Özselçuk and Madra 2007, Madra forthcoming). In this relatively new Marxian tradition, there is an emphasis on passion, pleasure, desire, and fantasy in constituting subjectivity. Thus, it is possible to see the knower as always engaged in knowing through or against desire; the question is, what remains of the idea of “truth” in the face of inescapable desire or pleasure or fantasy?
Finally, more radically, following a line of reasoning and critique opened up by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1971, Resch 1992), perhaps knowledge has no guiding subject, whether fissured, incomplete, or whole; in Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s words (2009)—in reflecting on the effects of the cybernetic revolution—knowledge production may now (if not in the past) involve “subjectless processes” (155–56), that is, “knowledge without a subject” (157) (see also Smith 1985).
Turning now to the content and form of inquiry, epistemology traditionally addresses concerns regarding truth claims, that is, how humans know and “justify” what they claim to know and what distinguishes non-knowledge (usually categorized as “beliefs”) from knowledge. Marxism has a long history of following the modernist project of cordoning off “ideological” non-truths from those statements that are justified either by/through practice and/or that proceed from and epitomize the application of a “scientific method.” Marxism has long debated ideology versus science (see Amariglio 1987 on Althusser’s distinction between them; see also Rossi-Landi 1990 and Kitching 1994), and many Marxists have turned back to Marx to find support for their positions that either Marx indeed inaugurated a new science (Murray 1988) or that Marxism has repeatedly failed to banish ideology from its precepts and methods. This failure is often portrayed as a result of Marxism’s misguided adoption of classical epistemological positions and procedures, including that of “positivism.” In this latter view, Marxism has yet to achieve its own scientific status; to do so requires the stripping away of that which is pre-scientific or ideological and, in its place, discovering/uncovering—”reading”—the particular epistemological norms implicit in Marx’s method in his writings, especially Capital. In this reading, truth is relative to and primarily contained within the discourse that produces it, and the norms of veracity and justification that are peculiar to Marxism are not replicated or found in other discourses, though they may share some general characteristics with scientific exploration sui generis.
As in other modernist scientific discourses, truth is occasionally equated with “certain knowledge” within Marxism. Marx gives credence, in part, to this association in his writings. To take one example, in recounting the biblically inflected story of “the master spinner” in volume 1 of Capital (1977, 725–730), Marx, in a rhetorical flourish, perhaps, makes a claim for revealed truth. About some specific truths that Capital puts on display, often in a show trial, Marx says, “we know perfectly well.” And that knowing, we come to understand, is the outcome of his exhaustive study of capitalist class exploitation and of the thieving expropriation of surplus-value from its original creators. For Marx, if we choose to read him this way, knowing exploitation is not through following an obfuscated discursive path; in fact, as he exclaims, it is “quite otherwise.” The singular process of Marxian knowledge production, through contradictions exposed and exploded, leads to knowing with clarity and precision.
While attributing to Marx a mostly successful quest for “certain knowledge” has its historical roots in the always-uphill struggle to establish a Marxist perspective amidst the so-called (capitalist-accented) “marketplace of ideas,” this slog, through the ups and downs of Marxism during the past 170 (give or take) years, also has been marked more recently by a different tendency: postmodernism. This postmodern or poststructuralist tendency toward truth (Anderson 1995) highlights a historically mandated and textually determined “uncertainty” or indeterminacy (on such indeterminacy, see Silverman’s 2013 comments and Resnick and Wolff’s response, also 2013), found through a reading of Marx’s works, and from there, through Marxism’s zigzag disquisitive history. Postmodern (and postcolonial) Marxists (Callari 1986, Resnick and Wolff 1987, Gibson-Graham 1996, Callari and Ruccio 1996, Ruccio and Amariglio 2003, Charusheela 2004, Bergeron 2006, among others), for example, frequently call attention to the “relativism” that they believe is Marx’s main epistemological message and/or is exemplified in his texts. They underscore a different insight; from Marx’s doctoral dissertation, Marx had a protracted interest in Epicurean philosophy and Lucretius, for whom inchoate matter is the true being of the world. In Lucretius, Marx not only found nascent materialism (as discovered in Spinoza), but he also found the idea of chance, which he emblematized as historical contingency. Marx’s aleatory materialism (Callari and Ruccio 1996, Hardy 2014), for postmodern Marxists, also establishes an under-determination in the realm of knowledge; a discursive whole cannot close itself. Influenced by Jacques Derrida’s conception of “deconstruction” (1967), postmodern Marxists insist that discourse is always marked by slippages, aporia, displacements, and deferments. For them, meaning is overdetermined and uncertain. A certain knower is thus a contradiction in terms.
In addition, if scientific discourse is not the mirror of nature, then there is an “ethical” dimension to all knowledge production. Cornel West (1989), utilizing Richard Rorty among other “pragmatist” philosophers, brings out the enduring, constitutive ethical and political aspects of how and what we know, and what we intend to do with this knowledge. As DeMartino (2016) and Diskin (2016) have also recently discussed, there is an ethical entailment in epistemological practices.
Another paramount aspect of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment epistemological discourse has been the issue of “correspondence,” that is, the question of whether or not the pursuit of truth is about thought being capable of creating a veracious account of the world outside the mind (in Marxism, see Ruben 1979, who finds a similar correspondence approach in Lenin 1927). Is true knowledge, as opposed to discourses of non-knowledge, a matter of thought conforming in essence to the real? In answering this question, this real is variously portrayed as existing prior to, independent of, and inexorably exterior to the mind. Yet, for some correspondence theorists, omnipresent, transcendent categories of the mind create a “real-in-thought” that can apprehend basic truths about that outer reality; there is an objective real to which thought should ultimately correspond, but it does not give itself up easily. In Marxism, for example, numerous theorists have pointed to Marx’s distinction between essence and appearance and, from there, have attributed to Marx an epistemology of daedal extraction, or as Marx put it, discovering “the rational kernel within the mystical shell” (1977, 103). As Althusser notes, this process of extraction is often made equivalent to Marx’s “inversion” of the Hegelian dialectic, Marx’s claim to have saved dialectics from its mystified idealist past and present by standing Hegel on his head. Truth only emerges through hermeneutical practice, and it will only correspond to the real material world if this interpretive practice is correctly undertaken.
The form of epistemological questioning with Marxism often has a close relationship to its content. One version has it that Marx is engrossed with laying bare the “laws of motion” that animate all socioeconomic formations, and especially that of capitalism. Towards that end, Marxists claiming Marx as their inspiration dedicate themselves to applying Marx’s science—his dialectical materialism (Paolucci 2007)—to any subject matter. Like other recognized, sanctioned sciences, such followers claim, Marx’s method allows for the true uncovering of how the material world works, and, indeed, how knowledge of the law-like motion of matter through time and in specific locations is part and parcel of the Marxian approach to epistemology (this is essentially Lenin’s summation [see 1930]).
The conceptualization of the production processes involved in making knowledge predictably varies with the different schools of Marxian thought. Several positions on knowledge production develop from a reading of Marx’s brief exposition in the Grundrisse (1973, see also Stuart Hall’s reading [2003] of Marx’s 1857 “Introduction”). In his first notebook, Marx describes a knowledge-producing process that starts from the concrete as first perceived, then moves to abstraction, in which those elements of the initial concrete perceptions that are homologous are gathered together in a generality. But, not stopping there—as Marx accuses many others of doing—he moves on to the ultimate concrete, as he puts it, a concrete that is the rich result of its many determinations. As a unity-in-motion, it is the totality that can be grasped only by following this correct order in thinking. So, in this version, Marx announces the cognitive mechanism that permits truths to rise to the surface, as knowledge is produced that is accurate and reflecting its own procedural determinations.
Althusser provides another Marxist version of producing knowledge, claiming to “read” Marx symptomatically through his writings. This reading includes denoting the unsaids or “absent presences” that give meaning to what Marx indeed did say. In his discussion of what he called “theoretical practice” (Althusser and Balibar 1970, Hindess and Hirst 1975, Patton 1978, Althusser 1990, Sharp 2000). Althusser rejects the empiricist epistemological tendency to regard truth as there for the taking. Instead, Althusser describes a scientific process that is productive of knowledge through a scientific discourse’s internal practices. Knowledge is not about finding essences in the real. Knowledge is not “objective” in this essentialist sense (Milberg and Pietrykowski 1994), and Marxism’s epistemological stance is, or seeks to be, anti-essentialist (Resnick and Wolff 1987).
Truth, instead, is constructed in-house, that is, within a science that has relative autonomy from other sciences’ norms and methods of finding truth. Marx’s dialectical materialism is such a theoretical practice, Althusser contends. It contains its own epistemological norms as to what truth consists of and how such truth can be propagated for continued proliferation. Theoretical practice produces truths in the realm of the “concrete-in-thought,” which is never adequate to, or a mirror of, the concrete-real that is always extrinsic to it but which is shaping it at all times (see Rorty 1979 for a non-Marxist criticism of knowledge mirroring nature). As Read (2005) states, “what defines science is less its specific content than its practice, the production of new objects of knowledge.” In one rendition, Althusser (1970) describes in detail the transition from pre-scientific, perhaps ideological, concepts and “facts” (what he called “Generality I”) to scientific knowledge (Generality III). Generality II, a middle term, is the process of production through the workings of a “problematic.” The problematic is a framework that delineates particular problems that must be addressed. The problematic also elaborates the theoretical labor needed for this reading, the protocols of experimentation and testing required for detaching ideological elements from scientific knowledge, unique standards of proof, and so forth. There is also no transcendent, transdiscursive element—like mathematics—that confers scientific status to all other elements in the theoretical framework (Ruccio 1988). For Althusserians, knowledge is material, relative, conjunctural and overdetermined—all parts are needed in their intereffectivity in producing a science.
We note that Critical Realism, associated with Bhaskar (1975) and Alex Callinicos within Marxism (Bhaskar and Callinicos 2003; see also Brown, Fleetwood, and Roberts 2005), is another attempt to escape the confines of empiricist and rationalist epistemologies; critical realism expounds a notion of scientific knowledge production that presumes a hierarchically structured external reality. In this view, there is an underlying ontological real, a set of deep structures that determine surface reality, which must exist in order for the practice of science as they understand it to take place (see Ruccio 2009 for an appreciative critique of this tendency in economics).
And, for some Marxists, knowledge is always local (see Santamaria 1992), specific, and historical; as the material conditions of existence for theoretical discourse change, so will its internal elements. Some Marxists believe that a new stage in capitalism has appeared, one in which knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption have taken center stage. Cognitive capitalism, as its proponents call it (Vercellone 2007, Boutang 2012) is marked by the so-called “dematerialization” of work and by the rising importance of immaterial labor and immaterial assets. In this late capitalist era, knowledge production is thought to consist mostly of “information” or data rather than analytics. But, the resistance of Marxists to notions of “intellectual capital” and “intellectual property” that are rife in describing this era preserves the Marxist epistemological perspective that knowledge emanates from work, immaterial or not.
Finally, turning to the effects and effectivity of knowledge, once again, there are variations in Marxism on the purposes and actual consequences knowledge has on everything else around it. Clearly, all Marxists know well Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in which he admonishes that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it” (in Tucker 1978, 145). Knowledge is a tool and a weapon, and the unique ideations that Marxism generates, its philosophical reflections, can and should take the form of class struggle in theory (Althusser 1976). Marxism thus conjoins theory and practice, and truth is practical and political at one and the same time. It follows that knowledge production is critical to political success, including the politics—struggles involving power (Foucault 1980, Stoddart 2007) and control—that also overdetermine the “pure” sciences. This Marxist view rejects the image of the pursuit of knowledge in any field as disinterested and neutral. From this standpoint, whether hitched closely or remotely to struggles in other areas of social existence, the conflict of ideas and contesting theories remains a fact of an organized thinking life. Into this mix, Marxism contributes its own science with its own point of view about the truths that matter and about the historical, conjunctural materiality of its own truth.
But another perspective on the way knowledge itself affects everything else is the Althusserian notion of “knowledge effects” (Althusser and Balibar 1970). Althusser put forward this idea to capture two ideas about the production of scientific knowledge. One is that knowledge is the result, an effect (and cause simultaneously) of a determinate production process: a material product (Althusser 2003). But, secondly, as result, knowledge is also a semblance, an artifice that exists only as the concrete-in-thought and not as “real knowledge,” or the imaginary essence of a graspable, apparent object. The semblance of its existence is all knowledge has; it is no specter, but it is also no essential concrete-real. Following scientific procedures internal to its own problematic and thereby traversing, by partly transforming, the sprawling lifeworld of ideological discourse, it emerges as the only “real” that can be adequately known. As an effect, therefore, it blurs the lines drawn in classical epistemology between the real and thought; it is the theoretical coalescence of both (this exhibits Althusser’s persistent Spinozism; see 2006). Knowledge effects reverberate throughout a social formation and are productive, in combination with other cognitive raw materials (including “everyday” representations [Ruccio 2008]), in their own right. For many Marxist epistemologists, knowledge is active and actionable, and its existence as material image/image of the material is one requisite condition for the revolutionary socioeconomic—especially class—change that Marx vehemently proposed.
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