Late last week, I finally got around to reading Althusser’s For Marx. I had not read the book because I was certain that everything I needed from the French thinker was in the collection Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays consists, which contains his masterpiece “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” I also had not read For Marx because I knew it pushed the absurd argument that a clean break existed between Hegel and Marx, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future were used to make this break look believable. It is not sensible or productive to pull apart Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. And it’s even less sensible to separate early Marx (1843 Manuscripts) from late Marx (Capital). And, finally, I strongly agreed with Herbert Marcuse’s reading of the 1844 Manuscripts, which was published 1933 and offered the German thinker a good alternative to Heidegger’s Being and Time. (Marcuse saw in the 1844 Manuscripts the process by which Marx would transform Hegel into Marxism, speculative philosophy into a social science.)

But the reason why I’m bringing all of this up is simply this: I completely side with what Althusser denounces in For Marx as “vulgar Marxism.” Meaning, a Marxism that begins and ends with the economy, with the way humans transform the natural world into their own world of food, clothing, and shelter. For me, the economy determines everything. It is a vulgar view of things, but it is also a hard and good ground to stand on.

But let’s look at the human brain for a second. We know it has three levels: a lower level, a middle level, and a higher level. We know that the lowest and oldest part of the brain is completely sunk in the functions of life. The life of being is its basic work. As for consciousness, this is made possible by the most recent, highest level of the brain. Consciousness, self-reflection, thought is not first but last to arrive on the scene; and because it is last, it is the first to go when there is a life-threatening emergency. For example, if a person is drowning, he/she quickly loses consciousness because the brain is trying to save all the energy it can, and consciousness, which you do not need for life, is not cheap but a big energy consumer, a very costly mental emergence. As it is with the brain, it is with society. Culture is a late development and it is also finally determined by the conditions of life, the economy, the base, the vulgar.

To use the words of Hegel: “Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.” This is were I begin and end any consideration of the material and immaterial objects of human culture.