Language, money, ideal

Ilyenkov’s Spinozist reading of Marx

Abstract

In this paper, I will show how Evald Ilyenkov, a Soviet Marxist and Spinozist who inspired a revival of critical Marxism in the 1950s and 70s in the Soviet Union and beyond, produces a specifically Spinozist reading of part one of Marx’s Capital on commodity and money-form. Ilyenkov proposes to understand Marx’s deduction of money-form from the logic of commodity as a “dialectic of the transformation of a thing into a symbol, and of a symbol into a [sign]”. While Dialectical Logic, where Ilyenkov proposes this reading, includes only a single chapter dedicated to Spinoza, I will show that Ilyenkov’s reading of Marx hinges on his idiosyncratic interpretation Spinoza’s conception of “thought” and relies on Spinoza’s theory of language. In order to advance his thesis, Ilyenkov develops a concept of the “ideal”, which he extracts from Marx but explicates with Spinoza as a privileged example. Ilyenkov understands ideal as an active capacity of the thinking body under the attribute of thought, which is realized under the attribute of extension in modification of external reality through labor by mediation of language and symbolization. While Spinoza’s view of language as a source of error and inadequate knowledge poses a challenge to the possibility of symbolic representation of adequate knowledge, Ilyenkov’s concept of the “ideal” provides, via Marx, a reading of Spinoza’s conception of adequate ideas as constituted by symbolically mediated practical activity of the thinking body under the attribute of extension.