Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Solidarische Praxis in Allianz mit der Natur. Marx’ dialektische Praxisphilosophie für das 21. Jahrhundert. Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2022. 205 pp. € 25.00.

Abstract

Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, the author of Solidarische Praxis in Allianz mit der Natur. Marx’ dialektische Praxisphilosophie für das 21. Jahrhundert, was professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Kassel from 1971 to 2007. He worked intensively in the field of a dialectical philosophy of practice and, through international conferences, was a promoter of “Philosophy of Practice”, the important school of thought that followed Marx. This volume comprises a selection of articles from 1998 to 2018 and two in-depth contributions to the specialist literature. They aim to elaborate and continue the dialectical–practical–philosophical core of Marx’s thought as a current, ground-breaking, and “historically significant” “critical philosophy of social practice” (p. 132). It is, in this sense, that Marx should be rediscovered. And in this way, Schmied-Kowarzik counters shortened and petrified receptions of Marx and relies on excellent citations and a systematic argumentation. With the approach of dialectical practical thinking, a positivist or objectivist understanding of science, which is also widespread in Marxist movements, is simultaneously rejected. Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, and Henri Lefebvre are particularly highlighted from the philosophy of practice that followed Marx. Schmied-Kowarzik draws an arc from Plato and Aristotle to the constellation between Hegel and Marx, in which philosophical thought culminated at the time. Marx’s “Theses ad Feuerbach” testify that he, again, placed thinking, as Plato once did, in the “primacy of practice” (pp. 16, 121). In the process, Marx came to terms with Hegel’s affirmative understanding of knowledge of reality and bourgeois society (p. 45) and with the latter’s dialectic. He developed the mode of “intervening critique” (p. 16) and his dialectical philosophy of praxis, so the original notation or “Philosophie der Praxis” in German. Accordingly, bourgeois social philosophy does not go beyond the idea of legal equality based on private property, i.e. the property, appropriation, and power relations of bourgeois economic society. But in this constitutional form, according to Marx, the “true, realised selfdetermination of the people” (p. 45) is not achieved. He found the roots of social problems in the political–economic conditions of capitalism, politicized himself, and developed the idea or “project” of a social upheaval as human and humanitarian “emancipation” (pp. 134–150). The coherence of Marx’s concrete research and of his work is explained by the core concept. In this context, practice, embedded in the “productivity of living nature” (p. 23), is conceived as the human mode of existence and reality in general. People