Rev Left Radio - Substance, Spirit, Struggle: From Spinoza through Hegel to Marx (and Beyond)

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

In this unlocked patreon episode Breht traces and explains a subterranean philosophical lineage running from Spinoza through Hegel to Marx and Louis Althusser. Beginning with Spinoza's conception of God or Nature as a single, immanent Substance, he explores how Hegel transforms Substance into a self-developing Subject, how Marx grounds the dialectic in material social life and class struggle, and how Althusser attempts to remove the final hidden Subject from Marxist theory. Along the way, he examines the concept of immanent critique, Kant's transcendental idealism, Hegel's master-slave dialectic, Marx's materialist transformation of idealism, and Althusser's concepts of overdetermination, interpellation, theoretical anti-humanism, and history as a "process without a Subject." What emerges is an ongoing struggle over immanence, contradiction, human agency, and whether history possesses either a sovereign author or a guaranteed destination. Listen to these related episodes to learn more: Economics and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844 Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses The Nature of All Things: Spinoza's Philosophical Odyssey Intro to German Idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, & Hegel Hegelian Dialectics: Contradiction, Marxism, & the Freudian Unconscious   Check out our new merch designs and support the show HERE Learn more here: https://revleftradio.com/  

So today I want to do something slightly different than a normal Rev Left episode. I want to articulate and clarify one philosophical lineage that, while often implicit and subterranean within Marxism, is often not well grasped or understood by many Marxists. While knowledge of this philosophical lineage is not necessary to be a Marxist organizer, I do think it is useful theoretically. It is intellectually fascinating in its own right. And hopefully when you walk away from this episode,

you'll feel the intellectual pleasure of having deepened your understanding of three centuries of high human thought. So today I'm going to trace out the dialectical relationship between Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, showing how each thinker built upon the previous one while simultaneously inverting them in dialectical and essential ways. This is not a simple chain of direct influence so much as a philosophical reconstruction, and I'll flag where the historical connections are direct and where I am drawing out a conceptual affinity. At the end, I'll bring in the work of Louis Althusair to explain how he builds on this lineage to argue for an anti-humanist Marxism, something I'll define later. In recent episodes, as well as episodes in our back catalog, we've talked a lot about Spinoza,

and longtime listeners will have some familiarity with his philosophy, a philosophy that, while not part of Marxism's direct historical formation became a major subterranean resource for later Marxist to thinkers. Starting with Spinoza's single substance, his God or nature ground of reality, I'll show how Hegel's entire philosophical system is both a continuity and a rupture from this core concept within Spinoza's philosophy. In turn, Marxism represents its own continuity and rupture from Hegel, with what I'll interpret as a subtle return to Spinoza at a higher level. Finally, I'll highlight how Althusair articulated a self-described, quote-unquote, Spinozist reading of Marx, that attempts to resolve a contradiction within Marxism, namely the humanist-versed anti-humanist strains of Marxism,

terms again, which I will, of course, define precisely in the course of this episode. So with all that in mind, let's get going. But before we do, just a quick note, I wrote this out on the script. In fact, me and my family took a vacation down to New Mexico recently, Tauce and Santa Fe, absolutely gorgeous, where the high desert meets the southern Rocky Mountains, the Sangred de Cristo Mountains, the Blood of Christo Mountains, the heavy indigenous influence of the culture still and the deep. history of indigenous ways of living and being and worshiping in that area. It was just,

it was just drenched in existential and spiritual meaning and naturalistic beauty. I absolutely loved it. But the drive from Omaha to New Mexico is about 12 hours. And so I spent several hours on the way there and several hours on the way back writing this script because I've had this idea for a while tracing this sort of subterranean lineage of philosophical thought. And I think it is fascinating in its own right. It's a very interesting. People will enjoy this and hopefully learn a lot. But whenever you're talking about philosophy, especially multiple philosophers and their connections, you want precision. And so to speak extemporaneously would be to probably sacrifice some of that precision that you can't that you can get when you actually write it all out.

So I wrote it all out. But in the process of reading this script, there almost certainly be times when I want to say something else outside the script. And so I'll say, as an aside, when I'm breaking from the script and continuing when I'm returning to the script. So hopefully I won't do that too much. But in those moments where I feel like something could use an explanation or an elaboration or an example or something like that, I'll say those phrases and you'll know that I'm off the script proper. But with all that in mind, let's turn to our starting point, the radical monism of Spinoza. And as an aside already, I just want to say, you know, a lot of people don't know a lot of this philosophy. You might have heard of, certainly you've heard of Marx if you're listening to this show.

Almost certainly you've heard of Hegel and have some understanding of Hegel's, you know, prelude to Marx. Many of you, long-time listeners will know Spinoza. People that are into philosophy will know Spinoza. Maybe you've just heard the name and know nothing about his philosophy. I'm going to not explain all these philosophers entire philosophies, of course. I'm explaining core concepts within their philosophies that form this subterranean lineage that we're going to talk about and sort of dig up and reveal. But I just wanted to say that while there is philosophical density here, because I want to be precise and I want to be philosophically correct in the way that I'm using terms and making connections, I also want this to be accessible.

So if you've listened to other philosophy episodes on Rev Left, I think you're totally well positioned to be able to understand in grass. this and even if you're pretty brand new to philosophy, I'm trying, and we'll see if I succeed or not, explain it in a way that's both philosophically rigorous and relatively accessible. So don't let not having a lot of understanding of philosophy stop you, because even if there's some parts of this that might go over your head or be difficult to wrestle with, I think ultimately you'll walk away with the big picture of how these thinkers, from Spinoza to Hegel to Marx, even to Althus there are connected. And there's something beautiful and fascinating and dialectical in how that thought unfolds through these different thinkers through the centuries.

So, and again, this is not the end-all-be-all-a philosophy. There's a million different types of philosophy, million different philosophers, philosophers that have criticized Hegel and Marx and Spinoza on philosophical grounds. We all take that for granted. But this is the lineage that I'm going to try to articulate today. All right. Continuing. Baruch de Spinoza was a 17th century philosopher who was born to a Jewish family who had fled Portugal for the much more tolerant Dutch Republic. Spinoza grew up in the robust Jewish community which had formed there, a community that would excommunicate him in 1656 when he was only 23 years old in the harshest possible terms short of outright imprisonment or execution. The surviving harem document doesn't even speak. out exactly what he was accused of. It curses him for unnamed, quote-unquote, abominable heresies and monster as deeds, and historians still argue about precisely what triggered it. What we know for certain is this. It happened before Spinoza completed the system that he's remembered for today.

Spinoza developed the ethics over many years and circulated substantial drafts privately among trusted readers by the mid-1660s. But the finished work wasn't published until 16. 1777, the year of his death. So it's more accurate to say that the community expelled him for heterodox ideas whose mature systematic form he hadn't yet completed, rather than for the finished philosophy later readers would associate with his name, which, if anything, makes the story more remarkable. A 23-year-old already considered dangerous enough to cast out entirely

years before he'd fully built a system that would make his name infamous, across Europe. A figure of the early Enlightenment, Spinoza's philosophy was defined by a rejection of Cartesian dualism. The philosophy of Rene Descartes, who believed, among other things, that mind and matter were two fundamentally separate substances. As an aside, substances here is like an ontological term in philosophy. We think of substances in different ways. We have more colloquial understandings of that term. Substance in the way that Spinoza use it is like the name, he has, the ontological term that he has for the ground of being,

for this God or nature, this ultimate reality of which mind and matter are just finite expressions of. Continuing. So to repeat myself, the philosophy of René de Kart, who believed, among other things, that mind and matter were two fundamentally separate substances

that merely interacted with one another. In the ethics, Spinoza articulated and defended with geometrical proofs, a unified metaphors metaphysics, which argued that mind and matter are not two separate substances at all, but rather attributes of one single infinite substance. Substance for Spinoza has infinitely many attributes, though human beings only have access to two of them, thought and extension,

or mind and body. Your individual mind is a finite mode, a particular limited expression of the bigger attribute of thought. Your individual body is a finite mode of the bigger attribute of extension. Same underlying reality expressing itself two different ways at the level of one particular person. So simply put, Spinoza argued that this underlying unified reality was God or nature, which for him amounted to the same exact thing. Everything that exists in the universe is a mode of this one, substance. The picture of the cosmos that emerges from the pages of the ethics is one in which the

structure of nature itself simply is God. This radical rupture from the Abrahamic Judeo-Christian conception of God, a supernatural entity outside of nature who creates the world and the creatures that inhabit it and who hands down religious and moral dictates for humans to follow, in favor of a conception of God identical to nature itself is what eventually made Spinoza's name synonymous with atheism in the eyes of his contemporaries and it's the philosophy that later readers, looking back, tend to associate with his expulsion

even if the formal charge sheet from 1656 never got that specific. Even Spinoza's own use of the word God seems dubious here, since by God he means nothing more than the necessary, imminent structure of nature itself, totally stripped of any semblance of providence, transcendence, purpose, or teleology. To a 17th century Orthodox Jew or Christian, such pronouncements were nothing short of blasphemy. But this hyper-naturalized conception of God, where the words nature and God literally mean the same exact thing, had other interesting qualities.

It was eternal and necessary. It was complete in and of itself. And conscious beings like us humans were, like the planets and trees and atoms and quirks, finite expressions of it. As such, humans do not have free will in any libertarian sense. We are thoroughly determined in Spinoza's work. But determination does not make every finite being simply passive. For Spinoza, we become more active and, and we become more active. And, you know, we become more active and, and more free as our actions arise from what he calls adequate understanding rather than from causes we only dimly comprehend. Everything that exists does so as a matter of total structural necessity as an inevitable expression of the one unified, foundational, and complete ground of reality. While from our perspective, time seems to unfold from the past into the present and future, this apparent movement is, on Spinoza's own terms, a feature only of finite things caught up in cause and effect. Never a feature of substance itself, whose eternity is not endless duration, but existence conceived as following necessarily from its own nature. The way mathematical truth is true outside of time altogether, rather than being true at every moment within it.

In modern cosmological terms, we might be allowed to say that Spinoza's God resembles what physicists and philosophers of time call the block universe. A conception of the cosmos in which time is treated as something like a fourth spatial dimension, such that if we could see reality from outside our limited vantage point, our lives, and all seeming temporal events in the universe, would be more like boreholes already drilled through a block of amber, than like a candle currently burning down. What we take to be the past, present, and future would all, in some sense, already be there as parts of a single space-time structure. That does not mean anyone could travel up and down a lifespan as though time were a hiking trail. A block universe does not by itself make time navigable.

It's worth being honest about the limits of this comparison, though. The block universe is a thesis about the geometry of spacetime. Spinoza's and eternity is a stranger and in some ways more radical claim than even that, closer to the timelessness of a geometric proof than to a four-dimensional block where all moments simply sit next to each other. The block universe is a genuinely useful modern intuition pump for what Spinoza is getting at, but it isn't quite the same claim. It is from the strange philosophy of Spinoza that later readers have drawn the mystical sounding idea, idea that we are the universe waking up to itself, that we are nature experiencing itself

from the inside out. And I want to pause on that phrase because it's beautiful and it's the kind of line that philosophy tempts you toward, but it's also, strictly speaking, smuggling in something Spinoza's own system doesn't allow. Waking up implies a before and an after. It implies development, a process, a substance that becomes more self-aware than it used to be. And Spinoza's substance doesn't do that. It's not waking up to anything. It's already eternally fully what it is. So hold that tension for a moment because it's going to matter a great deal very soon.

Still, the poetic instinct is pointing at something real in the text. Mind and matter, subject and object, God and world are all collapsed and to one single thing, one single substance. When I look through a telescope and stare into the stars, in some sense I am looking at myself, the same one substance modifying itself into a star out there and mind in here, neither one more fundamental than the other. As I write this, I'm writing in the back seat from Omaha to Denver and looking out the window. I see the silhouette of the Rocky Mountains.

Every peak haloed by fluffy cotton ball. clouds draped into soft white veils of snow. If I put on the lens of Spinoza and see this scene in accordance with his worldview, I'm struck with the sense that independent self-subsistence is, in an important respect, an illusion, a product of our limited, finite vantage point, rather than a fact about the deepest structure of reality. That does not mean finite things are unreal or indistinguishable. It means they are genuine. but dependent modes of one substance. In truth, on this view, I am the mountains pondering themselves, and the mountains are me

admiring myself. There's no heaven or hell here, no platonic realm outside of space and time, no supernatural forces pulling the strings of nature from some transcendent position outside of it. Everything simply is, here and now, what Spinoza calls, in his own famous Latin, subspecies, Eternatatus under the aspect of eternity. Interestingly, thinker steeped in a very different tradition, arrived at something that rhymes with this from the opposite direction. The Upanishads taught Thvon Asi, Thou art that, is a different vocabulary reaching for a strikingly

similar collapse of the space between the seer and the scene. Spinoza was not reading Sanskrit text in Amsterdam. but it's worth noting when two traditions working independently arrive at neighboring conclusions. And yet, and this is the scene we're about to pull on, if human minds really can move from ignorance toward adequate understanding, from ignorance toward the very insight I just described to you, where does that development actually happen on Spinoza's own terms? Not in substance, because he insists that that's already complete. only in us, right, in the finite modes catching up over time to a truth that was never incomplete in the first place.

Substance doesn't need our philosophical progress in order to become more fully itself. It already is maximally and eternally everything it will ever be. That's a strange place for a system to leave things. And it's exactly the crack that the next thinker in our story is going to press his thumb into. Before we get to Hegel, though, we must make a pit stop at another famous philosopher. Emanuel Kant. From Spinoza, we get the concept of a single substance, the infinite and eternal ground of reality, of which we are only finite and ephemeral modes.

Emmanuel Kant, living in writing a century after Spinoza and a half a century before Hegel, complicates this picture while adding in a crucial ingredient that Hegel will take and run with. Kant talked about the ultimate ground of reality in a different way. He called it the thing in itself. But it's worth being precise about what Kant means by that phrase because it's actually a different kind of concept than Spinoza's substance, not just a different name for the same thing. Spinoza is making a bold, positive claim about ultimate reality.

He tells you what it is, how many attributes it has, how everything follows from it with geometric necessity. Kant's thing in itself does the opposite. It's what philosophers call a limiting concept, a marker for the boundary past which our knowledge simply cannot reach, not a description of what's sitting out there past that boundary. Kant is deliberately agnostic about whether the thing in itself is one unified reality or many, because for Kant, even a concept as basic as one or many,

is a category that only legitimately applies to the world of our experience. Applying it to the thing in itself, to this theoretical ground of all reality, would already be claiming to know something about a reality that Kant insists we can't possibly know. So Spinoza hands us a fully articulated metaphysics. Kant hands us a boundary sign that says, in effect, reality is out there and here is exactly as far as your mind. can go toward it. However, whereas under Spinoza's conception,

human beings, and all conscious beings in the universe, were mere temporary modes of an eternal infinite ground of being, Kant introduced an active constituting subject. To try and articulate Kant's whole philosophy would take us far afield from the point of this episode, so I won't even attempt to do so. The main thing to understand about Kant was that he argued,

we could not know reality as it actually is. As limited creatures, we cannot know the thing in itself. We can only know reality through the prism of our particular minds, a sort of cognitive apparatus that we bring to the world and interpret it through. Kant argued that the reality we experience is not reality as it actually is, but is constructed via the relationship between our minds and reality. And here's the truly strange part. Stranger than it might first sound.

Kant isn't just saying that our senses filter the data the way one animal's eyes catch different wavelengths than another. He's saying that space and time themselves, the very container, anything would have to appear in for any mind whatsoever, are contributed by the structure of the mind, not simply found out there waiting to be picked up by whatever sense organs happen to be doing the picking up. To help understand this idea a bit more before moving on to Hegel's innovation,

it's useful to try and imagine what the universe or nature would look like from a theoretical God's eye perspective. A subjective apprehension of the cosmos that is not mediated by our particular sense organs and nervous system. Even the idea of what nature would look like through God's eyes subtly and not so subtly sneaks in sense organs through which to apprehend reality. after all, what would your experience of the world be if you had no eyes, no ears, no taste, smell, or touch? Subjective experience itself would be reduced to almost nothing. And even if, per some thought experiment, one still had internal thoughts, without eyes or ears, we wouldn't even have the capacity to learn the language through which thoughts get experience and expressed inwardly in the first place. It's safe to say that without sense organs and a nervous system to which they connect,

we wouldn't have much subjective experience at all. This thought experiment helps us understand what Kant means when he says we come to and experience reality through a very specific and notably contingent cognitive apparatus that, if we think about it, can't possibly experience reality as it actually exists, but only through the prism of our minds, which underpin our subjectivity and thoroughly mediator interaction with and experience of the objective world. Now, it's worth being precise about what kind of claim this actually is, because it's easy to hear that thought experiment and walk away with a slightly different idea than the one Kant

is making. It sounds like an evolutionary or biological point. Different sense organs, different data coming in, therefore different subjective experience. And that's true enough as far as it goes, but it's not quite Kant's claim. And Kant is actually more careful and stranger than that. Kant isn't arguing as a matter of biology that creatures evolving in a physical universe will find it useful to track space, time, and cause and effect. He's making what philosophers call a transcendental argument, a claim about what has to be true of any mind that experiences objects at all, logically prior to any question about evolution, biology, or even physics.

And he actually splits this into two different claims with two. different scopes. Space and time themselves, Kant says, are the specific forms of human sensibility. He does not claim every possible mind has to receive the world through space and time the way that we do. Other kinds of minds could, in principle, be structured entirely differently in ways we literally can't imagine, precisely because our imagination itself is stuck inside the forms we're trying to imagine our way out of. But the deeper categories of understand things like cause and effect, unity, substance, Kant pitches at a wider level. Any mind that has to take in raw sensory material and then actively organize it into

coherent experience, aliens with two dozen senses included, would need something functionally like those categories to do the organizing. So the alien doesn't just have more data. On Consvue, the alien's mind is still doing the same basic kind of work. ours is receiving something, then constituting an experience out of it just through different equipment, i.e. different sense organs. The point was never really about how many senses you have. It's that whatever equipment you've got, reality as experienced is being built by a mind, not simply delivered to it. So as an aside, you can see that Kant is saying that the reality

that we experience, the reality that we study with, um, science that we think about with philosophy that we, you know, tend to in art and, you know, try to have a mystical relationship with through religion. That reality is not out there and we are sort of blank slates that come and just see it as it is, but that actually it is a creation of the interaction between objective reality, the thing in itself, which we can't actually possibly get to, a reality as it actually exists, and our mental, cognitive apparatus that we bring to reality and interpret it through. So this is a relational dynamic between subject and object, which give rise to reality as opposed to perhaps an intuitive idea that reality is just out there and we come to it as, you know, more or less a blank slate or a neutral observer and just see it as it actually is, something perhaps more in line with empiricism. But again, to follow that road would be to digress far too much. So

Continuing. So with Spinoza, we find ourselves as temporary, limited, and finite modes of an eternal and infinite substance. We are not separate from that substance, but as such, as limited modes of and within it, we cannot ever come to know, experience, or even theoretically comprehend that substance in full. Then, Kant comes along to sketch out a vision of reality, wherein the constituting activity of the subject becomes central to explaining the very experience of reality that we have. Spinoza's substance and Kant's thing in itself are both, in their own way, gesturing at some ultimate ground lying beyond or beneath our ordinary categories. But where Spinoza claims to describe that ground, Kant deliberately refuses to.

Under Spinoza's philosophy, we are limited manifestations of substance. substance like temporary eddies in a great river. Under Kant's philosophy, we become active participants in the construction of experience. Though notice, Kant would remind us, we're only ever constructing our experience of reality this way, never touching the thing in itself doing the constituting on the other side. The main difference for our purposes is this. Under Kant, we become active participants in constituting the world as it appears to us. While under Spinoza, we are finally.

finite expressions of a reality were already fully inside of, capable of greater activity or passivity depending upon the adequacy of our understanding. So Hegel inherits two separate gifts and refuses two separate limitations. From Spinoza, he keeps the monism. There is one reality, not two, no split between a mental substance and a physical one, no world standing over and against another world. that part of Spinoza's system Hegel never gives up. What he refuses is what he regards as the staticity of substance itself.

Finite modes change and develop, but substance does not become a self-conscious historical process. The crack we already pulled on at the end of the last section. From Kant, he keeps the active constituting subject. Reality isn't just sitting there passively to be mirrored by a mind. The mind does real work. What he refuses in Kant is the gap, the thing in itself forever sealed off, permanently out of reach, an unknowable X sitting behind the world we're allowed to experience. Put those two refusals together, and you can already see the shape of Hegel's whole project before we've even defined a single one of his terms. He wants Spinoza's one world with Kant's active subject and neither Spinoza's staticity nor Kant's.

permanent gap. Substance has to become subject, and it has to actually reach the real, not just constitute an appearance of it, and stop there. So let's get into Hegel. Hegel, thinking and writing at the turn of the 19th century, takes these core insights from Spinoza and Kant, substance monism and constitutive subjectivity, respectively, while rejecting core aspects of each as well, Spinoza's staticity and constant. permanent gap. And as an aside,

Staticity, I mean the substance that doesn't move. The substance that is eternal and already complete in and of itself, right? There is no motion. There's no unfolding. There's no coming from ignorance to knowing. It just is. It already is fully completely. It's static. That's what I mean by Spinoza's staticity. And Kahn's permanent gap, just to remind you the gap that we can experience reality through our interpretation of it with our minds, but we can't ever know reality as it actually objectively is. We can't know the thing in. We can't know the thing itself. That is Kant's permanent epistemic gap. And so these are the two aspects of one Spinoza and one Kant that Hagell is going to reject. Continuing, Hagle argues that while Spinoza was correct

to advance the idea of substance, his static conception of it lacked three distinct things, subjectivity, internal contradiction, and teleology or history. By contrast, Hagle argues that Spinoza's substance lacks subjectivity in the specifically Hegelian sense. Spinoza does call God a thinking thing, and he says that the idea of God's essence exists in God. But this thought is not the self-relation of a historical subject whose self-knowledge develops. The attribute of thought does not make substance into spirit. Hegel's objection, then, is not that Spinoza's God literally does not think, but that it does not know itself as a self-developing subject.

Secondly, Hegel argues that Spinoza's substance lacks a sufficiently productive negativity or internal contradiction. It would be too simple to say Spinoza has no negation at all. Spinoza's famous proposition that determination entails negation becomes crucial for Hegel. For Hegel, anything definite only is what it is by not being a lot. other things. And this not being is an active, productive force, not merely in absence or a void. A thing's identity, according to Hegel, is constituted through difference in opposition. Hegel's complaint is that in Spinoza, negation marks the limitation of finite things, but never becomes a self-relating movement through which the whole differentiates and develops itself.

We will explore this idea more when we discuss the master's slave. dialectic. The clearest kind of contradiction is not simply the distance between what something is now and what it may become later. It is an internal relation through which a determination undermines itself, as when the master's need for recognition produces a form of domination that destroys the independent recognition he wanted in the first place. This kind of contradiction drives a position out of its apparent stability and into development. And this feeds in the the third critique Hegel has of Spinoza's substance, namely that it lacks history, it lacks teleology, it lacks becoming, it already completely and totally is. There is no unfolding.

There is no process. Taken together, Spinoza's substance, lacking subjectivity, negativity, and history creates a deep problem, a problem at bottom about the relationship between universals and particulars. In Spinoza's system, the differences between finite modes like you, me, a rock, and a star, are, in the final analysis, differences within one indivisible hole, not differences that the hole itself actively generates in needs. Hagle's criticism is that a system built this way can't actually explain how genuine individuality, particularity, or change ever gets off the ground, since nothing internal to substance requires or produces such differences.

In Hegel's reading, this is a system that imposes universality so singularly that it washes out particularity. More concretely, it ignores and evades the particular and its relationship to the universal. Spinoza himself does distinguish among finite modes and gives them duration, causal powers, and characteristic ways of persisting.

Hegel's charge is that these finite things lack genuinely self-grounding reality, and that their development never becomes a development of substance itself. Hegel has a famous line for philosophies that collapse all distinction into abstract unity. He says it's like a knight in which all cows are black. The immediate target of that line in the phenomenology is Shelling's philosophy of identity, not Spinoza directly, but it captures the type of object. Hagell also directs towards Spinoza. In the dark, every real distinction disappears.

Everything collapses into the same indistinct nothing. That's Hagle's charge against Spinoza's oneness. Not that Spinoza literally denies every finite difference, but that his philosophy ultimately dissolves those differences into the one substance, instead of fully explaining their necessity on their own terms. Instead of dissolving differences into oneness, Hegel wants to understand the relationship between them in a way that apprehends and grasps their connection, explaining them on their own terms instead of reducing one to the other.

In other words, Hegel wants to articulate the mechanism and process by which the one unified substance of Spinoza produces and sustains particular differences as necessary. Hegel refuses what he takes to be the reduction of all the myriad things, in nature, which themselves developed through time to dependent appearances of a deeper, insufficiently differentiated unity. For Spinoza, you and I and the trees outside my window and the planet Jupiter don't have independent self-subsisting realities. We are real as finite modifications of substance, but have no reality wholly separate from it. Any more than a wave has an independent reality distinct

from the ocean. Hagle inverts the classic accusation against Spinoza, whereas others argued that by saying nature and God are the same thing, Spinoza was an atheist. Hagle flips it and argues that by saying everything is so completely and totally one with God, Spinoza obliterates the ability for anything to be fully independently real. Philosophers have a name for this specific charge. A-cosmism, literally no world. Not that Spinoza has no God, but that he has no cosmos. Simply put, Hegel's charge is not that Spinoza cannot describe change among finite modes, he can, but that this change never becomes the self-development of substance, and that finite things never require the kind of fully mediated individuality Hegel thinks they require. Yet, when we look around us at nature, all we see is change,

all we see is development. All we see is history. From the Big Bang to you listening to these words right now, nature is nothing if it isn't a process of unfolding. For Hegel, it's true that one ultimate nature, God, reality underpins it all. But that ultimate reality isn't out there in some eternal static form. Rather, it's here and now, unfolding in a cosmic process of becoming. Hagle articulates this dynamic, self-mediating reality, through the concept of what he calls spirit. At its highest forms of self-comprehension in art, religion, and philosophy, it becomes what he calls absolute spirit. Hegel turns Spinoza's substance into spirit. While substance has no subjectivity, spirit does. While substance has no internal contradiction driving the unfolding process, spirit does.

While substance has no history, spirit manifests. through it. Hegel's spirit is Spinoza's substance animated, a dynamic, unfolding reality in a state of becoming, a state of coming to know itself through history. If for Spinoza, we are nature or God already complete, simply expressing itself through us, for Hegel, we are nature or God in the process of waking up to itself through history. and notice what this move also does to Kant. A substance that has become subject, that knows itself, that reaches its own completion

through history rather than sitting behind a permanent veil, that's no longer a sealed-off unknowable thing in itself either. There's no gap left for anything to hide behind. Hegel thinks that in the very same stroke that fixes Spinoza, he's also answered Kant. Spirit is not, in Hegel's account, motion arbitrarily added to Spinoza's substance from outside. It's what Hegel thinks substance must turn out to be once its truth is developed, according to Hegel's own speculative demands. Defining the dialectic.

Before we go any further, I want to pause and actually name the thing I've been doing to Spinoza this whole time, because I think most people carry around a version of, of the dialectic in their heads that isn't always quite right. You've probably heard it described as thesis antithesis synthesis synthesis. You propose an idea, someone else proposes the opposite idea, and the two of you meet in the middle and shake hands on a compromise. Now, that's a tidy little formula. It's easy to teach in an intro class, and it is not, in any meaningful sense, what Hegel is actually doing. Hagle barely uses that vocabulary, if at all. What I've actually just walked you through is close to what philosophers call imminent critique. Notice, Hegel doesn't

simply stand outside Spinoza's system and say, well, I happen to prefer a different metaphysics. He takes Spinoza's commitments, one substance, total necessity, no dualism, and argues that the system cannot adequately explain the reality and development of particular things using its own resources. To be fair to Spinoza, Hegel has not. thereby demonstrated a simple formal contradiction that every Spinoza must accept, he has shown what he regards as an inadequacy when Spinoza's categories are subjected to Hegel's own demand for self-mediating individuality and historical development. Whether that criticism succeeds is contested.

So the Spinoza section gives us something in the family of imminent critique, while the Lord and Bondsman later on in the Master Slave dialectic will give us a cleaner example of a position actually undoing itself through its own internal logic, right? Let me say that again. A position that actually undoes itself through its own internal logic. This is imminent critique. And that's the dialectic at its strongest. Not two opposed ideas meeting in a tidy synthesis,

but a determination generating a contradiction from within itself and through that contradiction being forced to become something more adequate than it was. This matters because a related operation is about to become the engine of everything else in this episode. Marx is going to subject Hegel to a materially grounded inversion, and a thinker will get to eventually, Louis Althusair, is going to perform what he calls a symptomatic reading of Marx. These aren't identical methods, but each thinker inherits a conceptual system, identifies a limit within it, and transforms or displaces its central terms. The dialectic isn't a debate technique. It's a claim about how reality itself and our thinking about reality actually moves. The master slave dialectic.

So let's watch this method in action at a smaller and more human scale than substance and spirit. Because Hegel doesn't only apply this logic to metaphysics. He applies it to consciousness itself, to the story of how a self becomes a self. And the clearest place he does this is in a famous passage from the phenomenology of spirit, usually called the master-slave dialectic or lordship in bondage. Here's the setup. Hegel says a self-consciousness can't actually know itself as free and independent all on its own in isolation. It needs to be recognized.

It needs to be seen and acknowledged by another self-consciousness. But here's the catch. That recognition only counts if it comes from someone who is themselves free, someone whose acknowledgement actually means something. So when two self-consciousnesses meet, each one demands the other's recognition. And each one has to prove they're not just another animal driven by survival instinct, but a being capable of rising above mere biological life. The only way to prove that, Hegel says, is to risk your life.

So the encounter-essessing. escalates into what he calls a trial by death, a life and death struggle, each party willing to die rather than submit, because submission would prove you're just a creature clinging to survival after all. Somebody blinks. One party faced with actual death chooses to submit rather than die, becomes the bondsman, the slave. The other, willing to go all the way, becomes the Lord, the Master. And as an aside here, thinking about chattel slavery and stuff might be unhelpful here. This is a thought experiment about self-reflection. So to try to copy and paste that on to that is very complicated and a philosophical move that somebody like Phenon would come along later and really kind of complicate and challenge in a deep way. So I think this master slave dialectic is deep into by Phonon.

perhaps at some point I will write a script or do an episode just on that taking this stuff further but I only had a certain amount of time so I'm just trying to explain the basics before going too deep into caveats and nuances and other critiques afterwards so

so you have one party faced with actual death chooses to submit that's the bondsman or the slave the other willing to go all the way becomes the lord of the master over the slave but here's the irony the twist that makes this passage so famous the master wins the fight and gets nothing he actually wanted.

He wanted recognition from an equal, another free being. What he gets instead is recognition from someone who's just, who he's just crushed into submission, and recognition from a subjugated consciousness is worthless as the very thing he was fighting for. Worse, the master now just consumes. The slave prepares everything, does all the work while the master enjoys the fruits directly. He stagnates. He develops nothing. The slave, meanwhile, is put to work transforming the material world through labor.

And it's here, Hegel says, that something remarkable happens. Through disciplined, formative work, actually shaping and mastering nature rather than just consuming it, the slave develops an interior life, self-discipline, a real relationship with the object world that the master never has to cultivate because the master never has to struggle with anything. The dominated party through labor quietly becomes the developing party. The relationship flips underneath its own surface. Notice what just happened structurally. Two consciousnesses in real genuine opposition,

a real contradiction, not an illusion smoothed over by some deeper, undifferentiated sameness. And that contradiction is exactly what drives development. This is Hegel doing at the level of human consciousness what Spirit does in his larger, historical system. Negativity, real opposition, producing real historical becoming. It's the dialectic at human scale in miniature. The handoff to Marx. So here's where Hegel has gotten this. Against Spinoza, he's given reality a subject, substance that knows itself. He's given it negativity, real internal contradiction, driving real development, exactly like we just saw with the Lord and the

bondsman. And he's given it history, a process of becoming, unfolding through time, rather than one eternal static fact. Against Kant, he's closed the gap. There's no permanently sealed off thing in itself anymore, because reason followed all the way through, reaches all the way to the real. That's a genuinely staggering philosophical achievement. But look closely at what ultimately gives the movement its intelligibility in Hegel's story. It's spirit. It's the idea, capital I. It's reason, capital R, coming to know itself. The idea here does not mean ordinary ideas floating around inside individual heads, and Hegel certainly does not ignore labor, institutions, civil society, or material dependence.

His idealism consists in interpreting those realities as moments within an ultimate, intelligible, self-developing rational whole. The whole vast drama, the trial by death, the Lord and the Bondsman, the entire unfolding of world history is ultimately comprehended as spirit coming to consciousness of itself. It is still at bottom and idealist, an idealist story. And as an aside here, hopefully you're kind of grappling with and grasping Hegel's spirit, this idea that there is this, you know, Spinoza's side. substance. It's not totally right to call it nature or God, though both can be used as descriptors

here. He calls it spirit or absolute spirit. And it is this waking up process that kind of uses, in this case, the only case that we know of human history as the, and human culture, and human institutions, human self-development, civilizational development, as its vehicle through which it comes to know itself at higher and higher levels. So you have this dialectic, you have this unfilitary, holding process, but well, Marx turns him on his head or sets him up, right, as it were, which we'll get into in a second, and talks about the material development

of reality. It's less mystical. It's less spooky, right? That there's like this spirit, this ideal form, this God or nature substance thing that through us is waking up to itself, but it is fundamentally a mental or rational or

idealist project. Right? It comes to know itself through us and the material reality that we live in is basically a product of its movement, of its idealist movement, that it comes to know us and the material world that we live in is a vehicle through which it comes to know us, not the thing that is the foundation of change itself, right, which is exactly what Marks is going to pick up on and we're going to talk about here in a second. But to kind of understand and grapple with Hegel's spirit and what he means by it is absolutely fascinating.

You know, a lot of Marxists, we are Hegelians in the sense, right? Marxist was a young left Hegelian. He changed, he broke. He had ruptures from Hegelian thought, particularly, though not limited to Hegel's idealism. But it's also a continuity, because you can see how a lot of this that we're talking about, this self-developing process through human history, you know, reaching higher and higher levels, the idea that Marx talks about where the working class needs to come do, consciousness of itself as a working class as part of the historical playing out of the shifting

of modes of production and the development of human society. You can see so much of that is already here in Hegel. And this is why Hegel is, I mean, such a profound philosophical thing or whether you love him or hate him. He does this fascinating move in philosophy that's never been done before and informs so much of what happens after. Even Francis Fukuyama, talking about the end of history is a self-described Hegelian. You know, there's right Hegelians, conservative Higalians, who used Hegel's philosophy. And in some ways, you could, Hagell himself was very conservative, although he was, as a younger man, a huge proponent of and fascinated and excited by the French Revolution. You know, Hagle talks about Napoleon as history on horseback.

These great men of history, as it were, are these tools that Spirit uses to come to know itself and you know napoleon is a product of the french revolution and spreads the secular republican values across europe at the end of a sword napoleon himself of course is is not rewarded for that napoleon you know uh ends up imprisoned on a rock and dies alone um after you know ultimately losing and and hitting up against its limits but hagel sees napoleon and you know other figures like caesar and and um alexander the great other quote unquote great men of history not as great individuals themselves who rose above history, but as like these particularly useful tools that the spirit uses and then discards.

You know, like our tragedies, our individual feelings, our ups and downs, the way that history develops often is through tragedy, often is through calamity, often is through war or famine or whatever that pushes us to the next innovation or the new form of organizing human society. Spirit doesn't care about those things. Spirit isn't touched by the tragedy of it all. Like, you know, in Hegel's worldview, we are kind of tools or vehicles that are to be used and discarded by Spirit. Our cultures at the collective level is where Spirit really comes to know itself in such a way that our individual lives matter not.

So even the great man of history theory, which we critique all the time, which is very liberal and individual Hegel's actually inverting here while he's propping up that yes there are great men and Napoleon is like a quintessential example of that because I mean Hegel's living through uh you know the he's he's living through the french revolution and his consequences which include napoleon so he's using that and napoleon was a world historical figure any way you cut it um but he inverts the great man theory by saying that these quote unquote great men are ultimately just used and their intentions and their values and what they think they think they're doing are just like little illusions of the individual consciousness. And what's really happening is that spirit is particularly using them to progress world history. And then, you know, does not care at all about what they think they're doing or what their intentions actually are or their individuality or how it makes them feel. Right. And I always found that really fun and interesting and an interesting inversion of the liberal great man of history theory.

But still, all that is to say is that there's right Hegelians, there's left Hegelians, there's liberals that are Hegelians. People might have Hegelian instincts without even knowing their Hegelians. A lot of my philosophy that I've developed over the years, which is not me just developing it as an individual, but obviously taking in a bunch of philosophy and parsing out my own worldview. Is Hegelian in structure even before I knew Hegel and his contributions? Interesting. Last thing I'll say, and we'll get back to the text, is my family is, is, Well, one side of my family is very German, right? I'm Irish on one side and German on the other,

with some other stuff sprinkled in there, but those are the two predominant ancestors. And in German, my grandma's maiden name was Holbein, and that traces and ancestral lines are traced back to southwestern Germany, specifically around like Stuttgart and towns like that in southwestern Germany. And that's the exact town that Hago was born in. So there's a, there's a real chance that I had living ancestors that lived alongside, worked alongside, existed alongside Hegel from the same little area of Germany, which I find, you know, interesting, if nothing else. Angles is another figure that comes from the, from the broader southwest Germany area that, you know, that my family comes from. So those are just fun things to consider. And the fact that I'm so drawn to German philosophy in particular, it's an interesting little.

a little personal note that I've always found amusing. Anyways, back to the text. I'll repeat the last thing I said. His idealism consists in interpreting those realities as moments within an ultimately intelligible, self-developing, rational whole. The whole vast drama, the trial by death, the Lord and the Bondsman,

the entire unfolding of world history, is ultimately comprehended as spirit coming to consciousness of itself. It is still at bottom an idealist, story. And a young German philosopher, reading Hegel a generation later, is going to ask a very simple, very dangerous question. What happens if we begin from material social life rather than ultimately interpreting it as a moment of the idea? Where's the sweat? Where's the mind, the factory, the field? The question is not whether Hegel noticed the physical and social world. He obviously did. The question is whether material processes are ultimately expressions of the idea's development,

or whether those processes and the practical activity of living people are themselves the starting point. If Hegel is right that contradiction drives development, fine. But is it really the idea contradicting itself that moves history forward? Or is it something a great deal more material than that? Carl Marx, grounding the dialectic in material social life. That philosopher is our beautiful boy, Carl Marx. And the move he makes is in its own way, related to the move Hegel made against Spinoza, an inversion and transformation of Hegel's system, not a simple rejection from outside.

Marx doesn't get here alone. There's a pivot point just before him, a philosopher named Ludwig Fierbach, who argued that Hegel had things backwards, that instead of God or spirit creating humanity in its image, it's humanity that projects its own best qualities outward and calls the projection God. Marx read this and thought Furibach was onto something real, but hadn't gone nearly far enough. Furibach's flips religion right side up. Marx wants to flip the entire dialectic right side up. Here's Marx's own formula, in a line that's become one of the,

the most quoted sentences in the history of political thought. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness. Turn that over in your head for a second, because it inverts Hegel completely. For Hegel, material and social history is ultimately comprehended as the self-development of spirit, and the real world is interpreted as the outward expression of that rational process. Marx says, no. Flip the starting point. It's the material conditions people actually live in, how they produce what they need to survive, who owns what, who works for whom, that shape what ideas people end up having in the first place. Consciousness does not arise independently and then create the social world

from above. It is formed within material social relations. But once formed, it becomes part of the practical activity through which those relations are reproduced or transformed. Circumstances shape people, while people collectively change their circumstances. That reciprocity is exactly what makes Marx a dialectical materialist rather than a mechanical one. But, and this is the crucial part, the part that makes Marx a dialectical thinker and not just a garden variety materialist, Marx doesn't throw out Hegel's dialectic. he keeps it. He keeps contradiction, negation, historical development as the actual engine of change.

He just relocates where contradiction lives. Instead of contradiction inside the idea, he wants contradictions inside the material relations of production themselves, between how a society actually produces its wealth and who's allowed to own and control that production. Marx calls these the forces of production and the relations of production. And when they fall out of step with each other, when what a society is capable of producing outstrips the property relations still governing who owns it, you get exactly the kind of internal tension Hagell located within conceptual and historical forms. A contradiction in the existing system cannot indefinitely contain without crisis, adaptation, or transformation. Feudal social relations were transformed

through pressures and class struggles of this kind. Capitalism generates its own crises and antagonisms as well. But those contradictions do not automatically guarantee socialism. Their outcome depends upon struggle, organization, and historical circumstance. And as an aside here, you can still see how in the Higalian dialectic and the historical unfolding as taken and materialized under Marx, when we're talking about modes of production, we're talking about collective social institutions, right? in the same way that in Higalian philosophy, individuals, it's not that they don't matter, right?

Because they're the constituent blocks that build up collective institutions, but that this spirit unfolds largely through individuals, yes, but it really unfolds through cultural and collective institutions that individuals build. And these modes of production under Marx are these collective communal forms of institutions governing their societies, but they're formed from below, not from. above, right? It's not the idea coming to realize itself, and that's what gives rise to these modes of production. It's the, it's the relation between people as they're producing and reproducing their means of life where this whole movement actually begins. That's the materialist inversion. But you can see why there, why there is this collectivity and this communal, this institutional, this cultural level at which these forces are fundamentally acting on. They're not acting on the level necessarily, primarily of individuals.

Back to the text. This is what the later Marxist tradition came to call dialectical materialism. Marx himself did not commonly use that phrase. And once you've walked the road that we've walked together, that name should sound less like jargon and more like a literal recipe. Take Hegel's dialectic, negation, contradiction, historical unfolding, and reground it, not in spirit, but in material, social reality. in body labor, production, institutions, and practical human activity, which, notice, can be interpreted

as pulling Marx back closer to Spinoza than to Hegel on one specific point. No transcendent spirit realizing itself through thought, just imminent reality developing according to its own internal necessities. Marx keeps Hegel's motion and returns to something like Spinoza's imminence. on the reconstruction I'm offering here he is transforming an argument that started two thinkers ago not starting a new one from scratch and as an aside this itself is a dialectical process the the transformations

from Spinoza through Kant and Hegel to Marx and beyond is itself a dialectical process which is you know fast you don't have to step outside the method itself to explain how the method comes to be back to the text Concretely, this is historical materialism.

History is not the story of ideas working themselves out, nor is it one universal staircase every society must climb in the same order. It is the history of concrete social formations, structured by modes of production, running into internal contradictions between how things get produced and who controls that production. In the European history that Marx analyzed, formations organized around slavery,

feudalism and capitalism developed and were transformed through contradictions that expressed themselves as class struggle. The real lived conflict between those who control productive property and those whose labor actually does the producing. But here's the question that's going to open up our next section, and it's one worth sitting with. Marx kept Hegel's history. Did he also, without quite meaning to? Keep Hegel's subject? First, it was spirit, realizing itself through history moving towards self-knowledge.

Is man, humanity alienated from its own labor under capitalism, destined to recover itself through revolution? Really doing something different? Or is that the same story? Wearing a different costume? Al Thuser, the anti-humanist

break. That question split 20th century Marxism in two. and the thinker who pushed hardest on it was a French philosopher named Louis Althusair. In the mid-1900s, one major current of Marxism, call it humanist Marxism,

leaned heavily on Marx's early writings, especially a set of manuscripts from 1844, where concepts like alienation and species being do real work. As an aside, we have episodes on, I think all of Marxist texts, or most of them at least, with the exception of Doth Capital and perhaps a couple other smaller ones. But we have manuscripts on Red Menace,

and I think on Rev. Left as well. But on Red Menace, we've covered many of these texts. So if you want to go learn more about early Marx, the manuscripts of 1844, go check out that episode on Red Menace where we walk you through. Alienation, we explain and give examples of species being, etc. We also have episodes on Althusayr

where we talk about humanist Marxism and we articulate Althusarian philosophy. And so if you're interested, and kind of like deepening your understanding of the stuff that we're passing through here. You can go check that out. And I would say also on those episodes of Al Thusair, I think I took a more humanist perspective, in part because I have an inclination in that direction,

but also in part because I think I didn't, I know I did not fully understand Althusair's anti-humanism. It was still sort of an opaque and vague concept at that time, whereas the humanist aspect of Marxism, which was much more clear in my mind. And so I was naturally more tenured. attended toward a partisan defense of humanist Marxism, which I'm not abandoning here,

but I am deepening my understanding of the anti-humanist critique and hopefully also allowing listeners to deepen theirs. So if I remember, I'll link to those episodes in the show notes so you can go find those very quickly. Back to the text. On this reading, this reading of humanist Marxism, emphasizing Marxist's early writings, capitalism alienates workers from their own human essence,

from the free creative activity that's supposedly at the core of what it means to be human. And communism is the story of humanity finally recovering that essence, becoming what it truly deep down already is. Notice the shape of that story. There's a subject. Man with the capital M or people with a capital P. That subject has an essence.

The essence gets distorted. History is the drama of getting it back. That is structurally Hegel's story about spirit, just with a different hero wearing the costume. Althusair thought this was a mistake, and he made a sharp, controversial claim to back it up. There's an actual rupture, he said. He borrowed a phrase from the philosopher of science, Gostin Bacillard, and called it an epistemological break, between the young Marx, still doing Higalian humanist philosophy of essence and alienation,

and the mature marks of capital, who Althusair argued had left all of that behind and founded something genuinely new, a science of history that doesn't need a concept of human essence to do its work at all. This is where the term anti-humanism comes in. And I want to be careful here, because it's the part people most often get wrong. I've gotten wrong in the past. Al-Thusair is not saying that he doesn't care about human suffering, or that Marxism shouldn't care about people's well-being. That would be a moral claim, and that's not what theoretical anti-humanism is about at all.

It's a claim about explanatory categories. Althusair's point is human nature, human essence. These are not scientific concepts that can actually do explanatory work. They're ideological ones. On his view, you don't start with some free-floating man, capital M, and explain history as the story of what happens to him. You start with structures, modes of production, class relations, ideology, and those structures are what produce the particular,

kind of subject, the particular kind of individual that exists in any given historical moment. Capitalism doesn't alienate some pre-existing true self. There is no pre-existing true self sitting behind capitalism waiting to be liberated. What counts as a person at all is itself a product of specific historical structures. And this is where his second big, difficult phrase comes in. history for Al Thusair is a process without a subject. Capital S subject, and I'm emphasizing that capital S. No single hero, no spirit, not man, not even the proletariat understood as history's chosen protagonist marching towards a destination of self-realization.

This does not mean that nobody acts. Althuzeir says that the masses make history and that class struggle is its motor. His point is that no collective actor, stands outside history as its sovereign author, and no guarantee is built into history that it is heading anywhere in particular. Economic, political, and ideological structures exist through practices carried out by real people, but those people are themselves formed within the relations they reproduce or contest. Althusair has a concept for how this actually plays out called overdetermination, borrowed loosely from Freud,

A revolutionary moment, he'd say, doesn't happen because one single contradiction, capital versus labor, finally reaches its logically necessary boiling point on schedule. It happens because multiple relatively autonomous contradictions, economic, political, ideological, national, etc., all press against each other at once in a specific contingent convergence. History doesn't have a plot. It has pressure from a lot of different directions that sometimes lines up. This is also where Althusair's promised Spinozism finally becomes explicit. First, Althusair draws upon the Spinozist idea of imminent causality. A social structure is not an invisible entity hovering behind society and pushing it from the outside. It exists in and through its effects.

Through institutions, relations, practices, and the forms of subjectivity, those relationships, those relations produce. Second, Spinoza's refusal to treat human beings as a separate kingdom within nature anticipates Althusair's refusal of a sovereign human subject standing outside social causation. And third, Spinoza's rejection of providential purpose helps Althusair think a history without a guaranteed destination. This is not a simple return to Spinoza, since Althusair also retains concept of contradiction and struggle that Spinoza does not formulate in the Higalian or Marxist way.

But it explains why Spinoza becomes so important to Althuser's reading of Marx. In his most durable concept, the one that you'll actually see used in left theory today is interpolation. His account of how ideology doesn't just give people false ideas about a truer self hiding underneath, it actually constitutes people as subjects in the first place. His famous image is someone walking down the street, and the police officer shouts, Hey, you! And you turn around, recognizing yourself as the one being addressed.

The turn does not mark the first chronological instant at which you become a subject. It dramatizes the fact that you are always already positioned to recognize the hail as meant for you. Ideology isn't a veil over some prior, truer you. It's part of what makes you a you at all. So as an aside, are you grasping this concept? When you look around at people in American society, can you see that ideology isn't necessarily distorting them? They have some pristine or preexisting or suffocate and understanding that ideology comes

and confuses, but that the ideology they've been steeped in their whole life literally constitute their subjectivity, that that comes first and prior, and that the selfhood and the subjectivity of like the average non-political quote-unquote American is not a distortion of some previous, you know, clarity, but but but their, but their subjectivity is a product of ideology itself, that ideology is the structure imposing and expressing itself through the subjectivity of people. And, and I do think, and perhaps Althusair does as well, that by becoming aware of this, by gaining a perspective on how ideology works, that you open up the pathway for you to be able to critique it, to have a metaperspective on it, to perhaps find ways of vetoing it. But even still, all of us are constituted, our subjectivities are structured through ideology, through the institutions and structures of ideology in the broadest sense, positive, the superstructural sense.

and we can do a lot of work to become aware of that and becoming aware of the ways in which your condition is the first step in being able to press back against or overcome some of that conditioning but still we are ideological subjects and there are a million ways where our subjectivities as Americans as an example because I'm an American and I'm talking to not just an American audience but largely one our experience our subjectivities are structured in lots of often frustrating ways by being American, by being workers and subjects within the particularities of American capitalism. And so I think there is, whether or not you ultimately agree without Fuzer, that there's this epistemic break between the young and the old Marx and the old Marx

is the true Marx, and that, you know, there's this anti-humanist structuralism that is utterly important and that is emphasized in Marx's more mature works and is under-emphasized or undermined in some ways by his earlier works. Whether or not you agree with all of that, I think most of us can understand this idea of interpolation and most of us can agree that subjectivities are constituted by ideology. Ideology doesn't obscure some pristine, pre-existing non-ideological subjectivity. So that structure comes first and the subjectivity comes second, not in reverse. Not that the subjectivity comes first, is distorted and has to be reclaimed, right? That's one of the core concepts here. Back to the text.

Here's why this belongs in our story and not as some unrelated late edition. Althusair is performing a related but not identical operation upon Marx. His symptomatic reading is not simply Hagellian imminent critique repeated one more time. It looks for the unspoken conceptual break, absence, or tension that makes a text's discoveries possible. He argues that Marx's own mature science does not actually need or want the Hegelian subject, still present in young Marx's language of essence and recovery. Strip that subject out, Althusair says, and finish the job. This is not one identical method repeating itself, but another transformation of an inherited

conceptual system from within. So let's land this plane. Let's walk back down the whole staircase one step at a time, because I think it's worth hearing the whole shape of it in a single breath. Spinoza says, there is one. reality, one substance, eternal and necessary and complete. Finite modes change, act, and endure, but substance itself does not develop into something it was not already eternally determined to be. Hegel says, that one reality is right, but it can't just sit there. Followed through on its own terms,

it has to become a subject, has to contain real contradiction, has to unfold through history. substance has to become spirit. Marx says, Hegel is right that history moves through contradiction, but it's not the idea contradicting itself up in the realm of thought. It's material, social, and economic contradiction down here where people actually produce what they need to live. Ground the dialectic and material, social, life, and practical activity,

and you get history as class struggle instead of history as spirits, autobiography. Althusair says, even Marx in his early work kept a hidden hero in the story. Man alienated and awaiting his own recovery, which is Hegel's spirit wearing a different mask. Strip that mask off too. And what you're left with isn't a story authored by any sovereign subject. It is a history of structures and struggles realized through the practices of people who are themselves formed within them with no guaranteed happy ending written into the nature of things.

I'm not going to pretend that that last move is comfortable or that it resolves cleanly. It doesn't, and I don't think it's supposed to. Humanist Marxism gives you something to organize around. Real people, real alienation, a real subject with real stakes in its own liberation. But it risks smuggling back in exactly the kind of idealism that this whole forethinker chain has been trying to shake loose from one link at a time. Althusair's structuralist Marxism gives you rigor, and an honest refusal to promise history is heading anywhere in particular

just because we'd like it to. But it pays for that honesty with the real cost. Critics like the historian E.P. Thompson accused Althusair of draining Marxism of exactly the thing revolutionary politics actually needs, agency, choice, somebody who can decide to act. Althusair himself would answer that the masses make history through class struggle. What he denies is that they do so as a sovereign subject standing outside the relations that constitute them. The harder question then is this.

How do historically constituted people acquire a collective agency capable of transforming the structures that formed them, without being elevated into a metaphysical hero whose victory is guaranteed in advance? that tension is still alive right now in every argument the left has about spontaneity versus organization about whether structural analysis is liberating or paralyzing about how much room there really is for a person or a movement to choose i don't think this episode is the place to settle all of that i think it's the place to make sure you understand exactly what's actually being argued about and where that argument came from a 200-year conversation in which each thinker inherits and inherits and transforms problems from those who came before.

It was not a smooth or inevitable sequence, and no thinker's logic simply demanded the arrival of the next. But reconstructed in this way, the lineage lets us see a recurring struggle over imminence, contradiction, history, and the subject. That's the whole chain. Spinoza's substance, animated into Hegel's spirit, grounded in Marx's material social life, stripped of its last hidden subject by Althusair. Four thinkers, not sharing one identical method, but linked by a recurring operation of inheritance, inversion, displacement, and reconstruction. And now, hopefully, you can actually see it. If you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us on patreon.com forward slash

RevLeft Radio. We also have new merch designed by our friend from Coffee Stain Comics. Really cool new RevLeft design that we put on merch. That's another way to support the show if you're not interested in the Patreon route. I hope this episode was clarifying or intellectually stimulating, and I hope it opens up doorways for you to take, walk through, and go explore more of this philosophy, because for me at least, philosophy is one of the pillars of my life. Like, I always return to it. I'm always fascinated by it. I'm always learning more by it. I'll, from it. I'll come to a thinker and then I'll leave them behind. Several years later, I'll come back to them and go deeper into them, learn more about them, leave them behind, come back, learn more about

them. It is like this sort of spiral upward where I'm coming back to philosophy and philosophers over and over throughout my life and every time I do, I'm deepening my understanding of them. And this essay here represents the latest iteration of that spiral, wherein my understanding of Spinoza, my understanding of particularly Hegel, and even Althusair and Marx to some extent, is continually being deepened. And we'll have more episodes on this coming up. Rev. Left has always had this philosophy strain within all of our work.

And my latest obsession is really trying to get a really good grip on Hegel, who is a notoriously difficult philosopher to fully comprehend. His system is so magisterial. It is still all-encompassing. And his writing style is very opaque and hard to struggle with. And he has these hundreds of pages of books, multiple of them, that is difficult in their own right to work through. But that is what I'm working on currently.

That's my kind of current philosophical obsession. And this essay kind of comes out of that. And I'm still very internally motivated to deepen my understanding. of all of these thinkers, but particularly Hegel at this moment. So I hope this was helpful. I hope most of you could follow along with it. There were some spots that are difficult. There's some jargon that you just, you have to engage with if you're going to be precise. And by loosening that jargon and philosophy and trying to put it into totally colloquial terms, you can lose some of that precision in a way that kind of hurts the philosophy of it. And that's always the tension when

you're learning and teaching philosophy is trying to strike that right balance. So, In the show notes, I'll link to the manuscripts, the Marks episode we did on the Marks text. I'll list our episodes on Althus there so you can get a deeper reading of him. Perhaps I'll throw some Spinoza and Hegel episodes in there too because we have done previous episodes on that. And I'll link to our merch store if you don't want to join us on Patreon, but you want a cool shirt. And in the process toss us $5 to $8. You can do it that way. All right.

Love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.