Marxism IS Metaphysical

And that is ok

I would like to share, as I write in my phone’s notes app thousands of feet in the air, what I think is my most scandalous theoretical position as a Marxist philosopher, one I arrived at around 2019, in my youth, and have ‘hid’ since.*

I have a very distinctive memory from around the time I finished my undergraduate studies in philosophy. The semester I graduated a wonderful professor of mine, Kent Anderson, gifted me a few dozen books on Marxism, Mao, and liberation theology. At that point I had been a Marxist for many years, but it was through these precious gifts that I first read Mao (I was already familiar with liberation theology, albeit primarily through Enrique Dussel’s and Juan José Bautista Segales’s lectures, not through the readings I would spend the summer doing).

(Dr. Kent Anderson and I at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa.)

(Here are the books I was gifted, photo from start of 2020).

From Mao I first read ‘On Contradiction,’ a groundbreaking text I’ve since had the opportunity to teach multiple times in seminars.** While it was in many ways illuminating, there was always something I - as someone who had traversed for years the history of philosophy - couldn’t wrap my head around: why such a stark bifurcation between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘dialectical’ conceptions of the world? I understood perfectly the need for some form of the distinction, but not for the usage of ‘metaphysical’ to describe non-dialectical thought.

My undergraduate studies were heavily influenced by an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. One semester we read Father William Clarke’s excellent text on the basics of Aristotelean-Thomism, The One and the Many, almost religiously. Few thinkers, therefore, shaped my early philosophical trajectory more than Aristotle.

It was precisely because of this background that I found the usage of metaphysics in some of the classical theorists of Marxism strange. Metaphysics seemed to be used as a catch-all for bad metaphysics, or, in other words, for some of the worst, most superficial, anti-dialectical philosophies.

It is only in this manner that one could explain why Aristotle - for whom metaphysics was first philosophy, and in whose corpus we first see the usage of the concept - was considered by Marx and Engels one of the great dialecticians of the ancient world. Even when referencing the greatness of Hegel, the one philosopher Marx ever avowed himself, in his later years, a pupil of, whom he was compared with was Aristotle. “Hegel,” for Marx and Engels, was “the Aristotle of the modern world.”

Hegel himself, in his Logic, addresses the famous quote from Newton: “physics, beware of metaphysics,” by saying that all humans are metaphysicians. It is only the non-human animal which remains purely at the level of physics. The degree of abstraction (concrete or otherwise) present in human thought was always-already performing that ‘going-beyond’ physics which, for Aristotle, defined in the most simple terms what metaphysics was. Metaphysics, in other words, was the inquiry into that which is beyond the merely tangible, physical, surface of the world we interact with. To think, that is, to think conceptually or through thought determinations, is fundamentally to operate with a degree of transcendence from that which is merely physical.

This is why, even when a science like physics thinks it is freed from metaphysics or philosophy, as Engels reminds us, they are often just in the grips of the worst metaphysics, operating with the most uncritical and shallow presumptions in their investigations. Similar to how, in our so-called post-ideological age, we often find ourselves under the meanest grip of ideology, precisely in thinking that we have gone beyond or above it.

And so why reduce metaphysics to simply non-dialectical thinking? To thinking that can’t think through immanent change, processes, contradiction, relationality, context, etc? When we speak about such forms of thought, are we not precisely talking about bad metaphysics, as opposed to dialectical thought, which stands as a good metaphysics? I think this is what, if made aware of the history of the usage of metaphysics, most Marxists in the tradition have actually meant when they attack metaphysics en toto.

When classical Marxist authors attack metaphysics, their actual object of critique isn’t metaphysics itself, but bad metaphysics, which is more fairly understood as something akin to what Evald Ilyenkov would later describe as abstract thought, or even what Hegel would previously label the ‘understanding.’***

Here is my scandalous proclamation:

Marxism, therefore, is not anti-metaphysical. It is, on the contrary, itself a metaphysics - a dialectical materialist metaphysics.

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* In the sense that I haven’t addressed it in an article of its own, but only in scattered comments on streams and articles dedicated to other subjects. One such article was, for instance, my review of Kaan Kangal’s wonderful text, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, which I was pleasantly surprised to find in it a kindred spirit with regard to the unfair manner our tradition has often treated metaphysics in. I have opted to keep the article essentially the same as it was when I wrote it, wifi-less, in the plane. I didn’t want to start adding a ton of citations to it and turn it into something other than what it was intended to be: a short blog post. Perhaps later on I will expand this argument for an academic article.

** You can access the recordings of these seminars HERE.

*** There is, therefore, a sense in which Marxism remains within the project of an immanent critique of bad metaphysics which, in the modern world, was initiated by Kant’s critique of Wolffian metaphysics. (Although it is, of course, carried out in completely different terms.)

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Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Partyand as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido