unity/identity of subject and object in Marx

I just wrote a rather big response to this, as this topic has been my main interest as of late, but my computer crashed moments before finishing. So I will summarize with the following:

I think Rees (or at least Rees as you have presented him) is absolutely correct here. There is an absolute irreducability of mind and matter in Marx. Monism does not start to develop until after Marx dies, first with Engels and then with the rest of the orthodox Marxists. Marx was absolutely correct on this matter, and I think you're worries about Engels' idealism is absolutely well-founded. Marx's critique of Hegel, beginning in 1843 with his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, through the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology, to the General Introduction to the Grundrisse, and finally to the Postface to the Second German Edition of Capital, is remarkably constant. His point is always that Hegel confuses conceptual development with real development, and this leads him to mysticism, sophistry (a word Marx uses in his 1843 Critique) and positivism (something Marx accuses Hegel of both in 1843 and again in 1873 with his Postface). While Marx obviously was not aware of "dialectical materialism" it is clear that his own relationship to Hegel was entirely different from the one claimed by Engels and the dialectical materialists as well as by Hegelian Marxists.

I do not think you should at all place Marx and Engels on the same side on this point. Certainly they were good friends and new each other's theories quite well. But there is no reason to think that Marx accepted the dialectic of nature. Terrell Carver has made this point quite well, using a mass of evidence, in Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship. In all extant letters of Marx and Engels on the dialectic of nature, Marx invariably refers to it as "your" (i.e. Engels') project, and Marx is always rather agnostic about the whole thing. It's clear that building a grand Weltanschuaang was not Marx's interest.

For the best treatment of this issue, I'd recommend the following works by Lucio Colletti:

From Rousseau to Lenin, particularly the essays "Marxism as a Sociology" and "From Hegel to Marcuse" (the latter essay is available here).

Marxism and Hegel. This also has a very interesting analysis of what is rational in Hegel, or what Marx meant when he referred to the rational side of the dialectic.

Marxism and the Dialectic, which is an old New Left Review article. I can send you this as a pdf, as well as an interview of Colletti with Perry Anderson, if you private message me your e-mail address (the interview addresses some of these issues as well).

I actually disagree with Colletti in his NLR article and interview (and it is certainly a nuanced but giant change from his earlier work), but he nevertheless clarifies the issues at stake in an extremely clear way, such that even his mistake is far above most theorist's insights.

Galvano Della Volpe also wrote an interesting book called Logic as a Positive Science, in which he analyzes particularly Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and argues that Marx did for the moral (human) world what Galileo did for the natural world, by repudiating the subsumption of reality into forms of thought prevalent in philosophers such as Hegel and Plato. I'm reading this one right now and it's quite difficult but definitely rewarding.

Mike

I would be curious about the implications of this line of reasoning.

One example of a process that might be seen as "dialectical" is the development of wage labor. Through the development of productive forces, society reaches a point where labor can measured in an entirely quantitative manner - this occurs along with the development of capital - congeal labor or money that reproduces itself. Then the quantitative expansion of wage labor results in a qualitatively different world, the world of capitalism.

So is this reasoning alien to what Marx was really saying since it involves contradictions playing off each other. Is it too simplistic?

Also, I would say that if thoughts are human brain waves, then they are as much a material reality as physical things. The main difference between thoughts and, shoes is that thoughts have a relation of reflection (or representation) to other things in the material world (obviously not perfect reflection). How does this relate to the "absolute irreducability of mind and matter in Marx"?

Best Wishes,

Red

Well, from my reading of the Thesese (sp?) on Feuerbach (I haven't read much Marx, any Hegel, I just really pleased with myself, so bear with me), well some people use these as an example of dualism, apparently. Seems like non-sense to me! I would imagine that the irreducibility of mind and matter are not too important to him, rather that what is real (what is dialectical in itself), is human activity (this from the thesese and some Korsch). I'm not sure how that is relevent... but if so then the epistemological / ontological questions should be posed in these terms, not as an explanation of nature / mind duality. Indeed, is this really a contradiction (my view, is start thinking dialectically about social practices and philosophies, I mean)

I think a mirror is the standard explanation.

for what its worth, I guess, one would have to understand Hegel to reply to your post

lol

Colletti: A bit crude apparently. I can believe that, if he completely rejects Hegel.

Identity is of the subject is part of the dialectical relation of the subject his objective social conditions. Identity is a contradiction of the self and the predetermined social constructs particular to a society.

The synthesis of thesis and antithesis helps to understand what Marx is discussing when he using the "Unity of Opposites". He avoids teleology by maintaining the dialectic at all levels of approach between mind and matter. The thesis of mind is a synthesis of its own contradictions and a contradiction with material reality's social structures.

No, Engels is making a dialectical argument and using nature as his example. This is a perfect example of dialectical contradiction through the agent of ecology, one by the way, that was decades ahead of his time.

Yeah, about as close as Adam's finger to God's in Michelango's famous painting. Hegel's dialectic was quite close to Marxist dialectic's but several absolutes occured within his dialectic that allowed a sollipsism to occur where the mind became the deity of the world. This deification of mind was also an aspect of Kant's Neumenon by the way.

No, there is both. The contradiction occurs at both levels here. The synthesis combines the opposite thesis and antithesis and illustrates both in contrast.

Nope. Marx was very clear on the fact that because man can think, he can grasp science and change the world (Thesis of Faurbach). Marxist dialectical materialism isn't just rooted in the material world, though many orthodox Marxists do do just that when they end up in vulgar economism.

I would say, and with all respect, that you do not have a good grasp of the Marxist dialectic. Having said that, I commend you for starting this discussion to learn more about it.

Marx's own thought was very dialectical, though it can be read in a determinist way, that's not a reflection of Marx's own thought. Marx was much more organic with his understanding and expression of the dialectic than a lot of his followers are with their analysis.

Step one to understanding the Marxist dialectic is to always look for the contradictions. Once you find the contradiction, determine which is the thesis of what, and what each's own internal contradiction is. It's rather simple once you get used to it.

Marx has a holistic approach that looks at systems that have conflicting tendencies within them, and these are a basis of change in those systems. This is similar to Aristotle's conception of the physical and biological world.

But "dialectic" traditionally referred to a social process, a debate, where there are interlocators. One interolocutor puts forward some thesis, and another interlocutor attacks it, offers counter-arguments, puts forward a different thesis (an antithesis), and the debate proceeds, and perhaps the original proponent is forced to modify his thesis to take account of the criticisms of his opponent (synthesis).

But i don't know what "dialectics" has to do with the issue of the separation between subject and object. These terms also get their meaning from human consciousness. If you perceive a tree, you are the subject of that state, it is happening to you, but it is direct at, it is "of", a tree, which is thus the "object" of that perception. For an idealist the physical world exists only "in" conscious states, and thus there is no physical cosmos independent of perceives, and hence no separation between subject and object.

t.
But it is merely a vague and confusing metaphor to try to apply this notion to the physical world, as Engels tries to do. Engels' attempts to formulate it in "Dialectics of Nature" are so vague it is impossible to be sure you've ever applied it right.

t.

A lot of questions are raised in this.

The relation of subject and object in Marx is not simple as people are Subjects and things are objects. In this society, capital becomes the subject and people are reduced to object status, not merely as an illusion, but in reality. There is an inversion, which is why Marx refers to the value-form, the commodity form, etc. as perverse, meaning both insane and displaced.

Rees’ comment is insubstantial, IMO. I am not familiar with any absolute identity of subject and object in Hegel. Adorno rightly refers to dialectic as the consistent sense of non-identity, which is closer. Hegel uses the term ‘identity’ in a speculative fashion, that is identity always contains the moment of non-identity within it, and vice versa. Unity of opposition, identity of opposites, etc. is in essence no different. As such, Hegel’s teleologism is both overstated and misunderstood. Where there is consciousness, there is teleology, but it need not be of an over-arching teleology. One could argue that Hegel, as a theist, necessarily tends in this direction, but the notion of teleology in his work is also situated in relation to freedom, which is ultimately of major concern to Hegel. A strictly teleological perspective must negate freedom, but arguably a notion of freedom utterly without purpose is merely chaotic. As such, to ascribe to Hegel or Marx a complete rejection of teleology is as nonsensical as to associate a strict determinism or anti-determinism (clearly determination is present in large doses in both Hegel and Marx, though general in the form of negative determination rather than that of abstract determination.) Similarly with the concept of progress. Neither of them are rank promoters of progress, but neither one simply rejects progress. We can leave this kind of abstract non-sense for scientism on one side and irrationalist lebensphilosophy on the other.

What is clear to me in Marx is that he is not concerned per se with the objects of natural science. Neither he nor Hegel ever held from anything I have seen to a notion of nature as dialectical, for the simple reason that nature cannot be a subject, only an object. Human beings, as consciously acting, purposive beings (purpose being determined by the human beings in question, not by some meta-entity like History or even Society.) this is why Marx takes us on a little trip in the first three paragraphs of chapter 7 of Volume of Capital, which contains the discussion of the bee and the architect. This is a very succinct and powerful paragraph, and for someone to claim that Marx simply treats mind as brain would do well to pay attention to the importance of the ideality, conceptuality and abstraction in Marx’s work.

Hegel however certainly rejects Cartesian dualism between mind and matter, as does Marx. Hegel resolves it differently, but he does not reduce matter to mind. This would be subjective idealism, not Hegel’s absolute idealism. Hegel is essentially a realist. However, Hegel grasps human practice only in terms of conceptual activity, conceptual practice. Marx is concerned with practice as the practice of sensuous beings, as practical-theoretical activity. This is no dualism either. However, one cannot simply posit the simple or absolute identity of mind and being, concept and thing. Their relation is mediated by the social activity of human beings, it is constituted and it is this process of constitution of concept and object that is of interest to both Marx and Hegel.

Engels, especially in his later work, goes down a different path than Marx. There is no dialectics of nature, for the main reason I noted above. At best, one could say that there is a dialectical relation between human beings and nature in the movement between human beings and nature as the exteriority of human beings, that is, their acting on and within the world creates the world as nature, as an object for human beings. However, this would still indicate that there is no dialectic in nature sans human beings. It would also still indicate that objective here refers to a world that is extra-human, not merely extra-mental. Society and social relations are objective in the latter, but not the former sense. To the extent that society appears as extra-human is the degree to which we have an ideological notion of society. This is why one of the key aspects of ideology is its ability and need to naturalize social relations, to eternalize them. This is the importance of the concept of history in Marx as a critical concept is that it is only in history that we can show the non-naturalness, the finiteness, the human-ness of all social relations. Scientism which would have us argue that social relations exist which are natural are both reactionary and unable to properly cognize their object.

In large part, therefore, I agree with Mike on Marx, but not on Hegel. IMO, the fact that Della Volpe and Colletti got their Hegel from Croce is a severely distorting factor, not to mention that the Hegelianism of the official PCI philosophers has the same effect as it did in France, though I am comfortable with Mike’s argument that Colletti is a far more interesting thinker than Althusser and that conflating the two is to devalue and mis-represent Colletti’s work.

In a lot of this I am informed by my reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx’s works, and for third party sources especially the work of Hans-Georg Backhaus, Slavoj Zizek and Helmut Reichelt, and to lesser degrees by Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Lukacs, CLR James, Marxist-Humanism and Guy Debord, if you want references.

On other comments

I don’t see the development of the productive forces, if one uses it in the sense of ‘means of production’ as determining the transition to wage-labor, value and capital. It is not that labor reaches a point where it can be measured quantitatively. Rather, with the development of generalized exchange relations, with the development of Value and Capital, that is, which do not exist prior to ‘capitalist society’, labor is treated itself as an exchange-value, as something quantifiable, only because generalized exchange and money relations allow the abstracting from all concrete qualities and the reduction of all objects of exchange to quantities.

The development and generalization of exchange relations and money and even capital precede generalized wage-labor and drive the reduction of all labor to wage-labor, that is, it drives the separation of the producers from the means of production and the mean of consumption except through exchange. That labor later becomes the predicate of the full development of capital, that is, that is switches from result to predicate, is Imo a better example of a dialectical movement, of a kind of inversion of relations that is determinate.

On the idea of subject-object in relation to capital-labor relation, labor is the subject in the sense that capital is the alienated objectivity of the laborer dominating the laborer. That is, capital becomes a subject. But in this we should not confuse capital with physical materials, any more than the commodity is primarily a physical thing, any more than Value is physical property. These are abstractions, ideal: onto-theological objects who exist only in and through specific social relations between human beings. The object which the subject creates most importantly is the capital-labor relation, but it is capital which appears to act, to direct, to decide, to play the role of Subject. Capital is, within the confines of this society, the true subject and the proletariat is a subject in the mode of being denied, only a subject as the negation of capital, but not within the circuit of capital. There labor is merely an object alongside raw materials and machinery, the v that is variable capital.

As far as synthesis goes, it is not this but rupture, split, contradiction, non-identity which are central to both Hegel and Marx. Unity is a form of violence in Hegel. Identity can obscure. The hobby horse of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is a bowdlerization of dialectic which has retained far too much weight as a commonplace of academic (mis-)treatment of Hegel.

I also cannot stress how much the reduction of Marx to such a “method” is wrong. His dialectic is in what he repeatedly and for decades refers to as the genetic exposition, the genetic method of exposition, the dialectical method of exposition, etc. This method of exposition qua critique takes up the names and concepts used (in Marx’s case esp. in political economy), and re-arranges them in a way that illuminates them and throws light on them in a way that is non-trivial, that is, in a way which tries to show the ‘social sciences’ exactly what they seem incapable of finding: their object. Marx is certainly following Hegel, Proudhon, Fourier and others in critiquing metaphysics, morality, politics and economics as the precarious or false sciences, as sciences which cannot determine their object, in contrast to the natural sciences.

Marx’s genetic method of exposition does not simply engage in abstract negation, that is, standing from another set of principles to show that X is wrong according to Y. Rather, he shows from within X how X is false. This is not so much an empirical operation, as any theoretical matter which can be proved empirically can also be disproved by the same empirical material. Rather, this genetic method of exposition re-arranges and illuminates categories in such a way as to give us, and this is the most contentious claim, non-empirical knowledge. This is why Marx’s critique of political economy begins with his appropriation of Feuerbach’s critique of metaphysics and theology because for Marx political economy is itself an onto-theological/social-metaphysical construction.

This genetic method also allows us to then grasp how the object of critique is constituted. This issue of constitution is huge, though treated in completely different ways, to both Hegel and Marx. Marx never presupposes his object and his principles, and it is exactly in this way that Marx takes political economy to task: It never asks why this activity takes that form. It is why I insist that Marx’s work is about form and critique, about the constitution of relations, not about value as a given object, but as a form of relations that is constituted and re-constituted every day.

As such, I cannot see any truth in the idea that Marx’s work is about a theory of “change in systems” “that have conflicting tendencies within them”, as that would exactly presuppose what must be shown: the constitution of a system (and not of a natural system, but of human ‘systems’), of the contradictions, as forms of human relations. That would be to reduce Marx to a sociologist (I do not employ the term ‘bourgeois sociologist’ because it would be redundant.) Nor is Marx a holist, anymore than Hegel. Totality has a very different meaning to them than the organicist fantasies of most of what passes as holism. Not to mention that no conceptual approach as indebted to non-identity, split, rupture, separation, etc. can be seriously thought of as holistic.

I hope this next does not seem mean, it is not my intent, but I do mean to be a bit sharp. Reducing dialectic to merely its original Greek meaning is most certainly the worst kind of historicism and scholasticism. While Aristotle is always a major interlocutor in Hegel’s work, and certainly to some degree in Marx’s as well, the dialectic that comes out of 18th-19th century German philosophy does not look very much the same. Statements like this should be avoided for their failure to say anything of substance if nothing else. I hope one would not reduce classical political economy to being Greek ‘economics’ because of the philological origins of the term. It would be sad indeed to treat political economy in the sense of the oikos, though no small number of vulgar economists do so in their treatment of the household as the central unit of ‘economics’.

Chris

I think it is the worst sort of scholasticism to take for granted as Holy Writ what Marx, Hegel or anyone else says, and concern yourself only with exegesis, as if the question of its verification in reality, its practical utility in explanation, are never to be considered.

If their ideas are to be of use, and worth acceptance, this has to be shown in terms of explaining our actual experience, what we actually know about the unfolding world. If Marx's hypotheses are acceptable, they are so because they are the best explanation for the series of events, the various facts that it ostensibly seeks to explain, and this also has to be judged in terms of how well it fits with our other explanatory hypotheses about the various other spheres of existence (such as evolutionary biology).

The term "dialectical" as used in modern philosophy does in fact derive from its ancient Greek sense. if a person puts forth some argument for a conclusion, and someone responds to that with counterarguments, and the original proponent does not respond effectively to the criticisms, the proponent's overall performance is said to be "dialectically deficient", that is, deficient in terms of the cogency of his/her position.

I don't profess to understand Hegel...and i find his terminology obtuse...There were in fact numerous followers of Hegel in the 19th century, like Bradley in England and others, and who were advocates of "Absolute Idealism." But there idealism did in fact deny any independent physical realm apart from human consciousness. That means they weren't realists.

Aristotle was not a holist in the sense in which Hegel is. For Aristotle there are distinct facts, this thing has this property. If each fact contains the rest of world within it implicitly -- this is what "Absolute Idealism" is historically taken to immply -- then it's hard to see how we can account for human knowledge since we learn about the world fact by fact, bit by bit. Our cognitive equipment is based on picking up discrete bits of information.

There is also contingency in the world...this event might not have happened. But Hegel seems to have held...and certainly his "Absolute Idealist" followers did hold...that everything is internally related to everything else. This implies that there is no contingency in the world, no accidents of history.

chris writes: "As such, I cannot see any truth in the idea that Marx’s work is about a theory of “change in systems” “that have conflicting tendencies within them”, as that would exactly presuppose what must be shown: the constitution of a system (and not of a natural system, but of human ‘systems’), of the contradictions, as forms of human relations."

I don't really understand your argument. Any theory about what capitalism is will presuppose that it exists, and thus has been "constituted" as a system. That it is constituted by human relations doesn't change the fact that any theory of it presupposes that it exists and is thus constituted.

I'm personally not a "marxist" so I'm not terribly preoccupied with interpreting the writings of the Old Man. I find some of M.'s ideas useful, others not useful.

t.

Hmm,

My impression is that there is a divide between those who take Marx's thought as Hegel slightly corrected and those who take Marx's thought as a rationalism or scientism that was polluted by Hegel initially and then recovered to become almost completely independent.

I would tend to reject both these positions but the only way to make such rejection concrete is to formulate the most crucial "dialectics" of Marx in a way that is neither dependent on Hegel nor a simple (Kantian?) scientism. That's what I see "modern communist" writers like Gilles Dauve, The Situationist International and other post-Situationist writers doing.

Best,

Red

This doesn't include everyone, for example Lucio Colletti (and I would argue Marx). At best this describes Hegelian Marxists on the one side and Althusser on the other. Both positions are very weak.

Debord's "dialectic" is entirely in line with "dialectical materialism" (and a little bit of Korsch thrown in when it comes to historically situating Hegel). Dauve has said almost nothing on these questions. Needless to say I have no sympathy for either approach and I don't think they've achieved what you think they have.

I'll write more on this later.

Mike

you ever going to go back to the excahnge value and use value discussion?

I don't know if I'd say it's "too simplistic" but I don't see what it has to do with history, which after all is what one is trying to explain when one speaks of the genesis of capitalism. The development of capitalism did not occur through the piecemeal accumulation of propertyless workers but through the dispossession of the peasantry, which from the start marked a new epoch in social production.

I also disagree with the idea that this development had anything to do with the possibility of labor being measured "in an entirely quantitative manner." The determinants of value (human labor and labor-time) were certainly present before capitalism. The specificity of value lies in the fact that these properties become objective properties of the commodity, creating an inversion of subject and predicate. In addition, for practical purposes the labor-time that produces value is generally measured in money (note: this does not mean that I think this is the only measure of labor-time, but it is the one used in practice). So the possibility of measuring labor-time purely quantitatively in a technical sense isn't really relevant here. Besides, to my knowledge this didn't happen until the development of Taylorism and capitalism certainly existed long before Taylorism.

I don't think anyone would deny that the basis of thought is physical. The human after all is a physical-natural being and not a ghost inside a machine. But thought is able to transcend the laws of nature. For example, it can imagine things which don't exist, and it can even imagine things whose existence is entirely impossible. None of this can be reduced to the material basis of knowledge, which is the physical world and the existence of humanity as a species.

A few general comments on Chris Wright's post, since I don't have time to get into a detailed debate about this (admittedly very interesting) topic:

Firstly, you keep grouping Marx and Hegel in together (for example you say that "it is this process of constitution of concept and object that is of interest to both Marx and Hegel"). Nowhere do you differentiate Marx and Hegel. I would be the last person to say that you have to give your complete view of everything on an online messageboard, but this certainly leaves one wanting. Taking your post on its own, it would be absolutely impossible to understand Marx's brutal critique of Hegel in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, or even the 1844 Manuscripts. The "process of constitution of concept and object", which according to you "is of interest to both Marx and Hegel," is described in completely different and absolutely opposed ways in the two theorists, which you unfortunately do not so much as mention. Why (and how) is the theory entirely different, even opposed, in Marx and Hegel? Are you a proponent of the idea that there is a contradiction between Hegel's "method" (dialectic) and his "system" (the political theory)? Or is it something deeper, something within Hegel's dialectic itself? Marx of course thought that the Hegel's dialectic itself was mystified (see the Postface to Capital), and he also treated Hegel's political theory as a necessary outgrowth of his dialectic. But perhaps you disagree with Marx. But if this is in fact the case, then you need to explain why Marx didn't understand his own relation to Hegel.

(That Marx didn't understand his own relation to Hegel isn't impossible. As an example of such a mistaken judgement by Marx of his own intellectual ancestry, see the interesting case made about Marx and Rousseau in Galvano Della Volpe's "The Marxist Critique of Rousseau", New Left Review 59.)

Secondly, you say: "Unity of opposition, identity of opposites, etc. is in essence no different."

I wouldn't be so quick to say this. Colletti brings up in "Marxism and the Dialectic" that in Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx criticizes Hegel for imputing the form of logical contradiction to reality. In other words, Hegel takes the opposition in reality to be the form of "A, not-A" (i.e. dialectical contradiction) rather than "A, B" (or "real opposition"). Marx essentially says that in reality the two poles of the extremes are not mediated, they do not belong to each other but express absolute hostility. In other words, Marx upholds the (in)famous law of non-contradiction against Hegel.

It is true that Marx describes many aspects of the capitalist mode of production as contradictory in the dialectical sense (A, not-A), such as the contradiction between purchase and sale, capital and wage-labor, and the relative and equivalent form of value, just to name a few that I'm aware of at the moment (I'd be willing to bet there are more).

But it would be a stretch (to say the least!) to make this out to be the same thing as Hegel, or as a verification of Hegel. The contradictory aspects of capitalism are located, for Marx, precisely in capital's insane relations of production. It is not as if all reality, qua reality, is contradictory for Marx (contra the dialectical materialists). The meaning and location of dialectical contradictions has completely changed from Hegel to Marx. For the former, dialectical contradiction is the source of all movement. For the latter, dialectical contradiction is the source of movement only in a society whose form of social life is topsy-turvy and upside-down.

And lastly, I ask you to back up this statement: ..."the fact that Della Volpe and Colletti got their Hegel from Croce is a severely distorting factor."

How do you know this? Are you inferring this from the simple fact that Della Volpe and Colletti were both Italian, and Croce was a major figure in Italian intellectual culture? Can you cite statements from either thinker which support your view that they subsume Hegel under Croce's form of idealism?

Unless I'm missing something, I think you're simply wrong on this. Colletti never assimilates Hegel to Croce. Della Volpe was supposedy a Crocean at one point (supposedly! I'm getting this from Ralph Dumain's website but there is other misinformation on Colletti on the same page, so I'm hesitant to attach any significance to this). But in Logic as a Positive Science his critique of Hegel and his critique of Croce are distinct (albeit related).

I also find your claim to be strangely bold coming from someone who has never read Croce (as you mentioned in the "Marcuse and false consciousness" thread). So forgive me if I feel that those statements, at least at first glance, seem rather wild.

Mike

I haven't read much, and I haven't some across any Marx that DOES explain the difference between mind and matter. But I would definetly say that Marx thinks that reality itself is dialectical, but that reality is not some mind independent object, but human activity.

What kind of reality could be dialectical? If be reality you mean the Real then I think it makes no sense to talk about its being dialectical.

It seems to me that whilst you cannot know the Real directly, nevertheless you can interact with it.

it's reality and it's relationship with the real that is dialetical and is so because of the dialectical nature of our subjectivity.

Wouldn't that put too much emphasis on the theorectical attituyde, rather than human activity - unless that is what you mean by subjectivity.

human activity is subjective.

How so? Surely if I smash something with a hammer then its objective existence is altered, whatever that objective existence might be.

yeah but you decide to smash the thing, it's a result of your subjectivity, your desire to do stuff.

i'm not claiming that you can just imagine that the thing isn't in a thousand pieces, that would be retarded.

Also it's this dialetic between the subject and object that defines human consciousness.

OK, so reality in that sense is my subjective relationship with the Real. I think I got it.

Not sure I understodd that, but it could be said that subjectivity is an active synthesis of motor proceses - and in this respect at least was is real (different to the Real?) is human activity. I mean, it doesn't sound incredible that a 19th century "philospher" thought that all subjectivity is active - though I have no seen this in anything I read. Shrug.

So, that would mean that we can understand subjectivity as that point in which an automatic relfex becomes under control. In psychology modules I was taught that even imaganing a square involves barin areas involved in gross motor processes. Can;t remember which.

I don't know why you are interpreting subjectivity to be just thought, it's discursive.

Satanismycopilote, you may find that Joseph Dietzgen's The nature of human brain work, helps to give some answers to your point

This work is a very interesting exploration of the question and a very real contribution to the workers' movement.
The discussion has been very interesting, especially the discussion of Marx and Engel's understanding of the question. However, the lack of reference to the discussion of this question within the wider workers' movement has tended at times to concentrate on the work of modern academic marxists, rather than the contribution of the workers' movement.