Enrique Dussel and Katya Colmenares
Hinkelammert (1931-2023) was called the Marx of this time, for having developed and updated the method of Marx’s theory of fetishism
Franz Josef Hinkelammert is the greatest contemporary Latin American critical thinker.
His work exposes the ideological, fetishist and domination foundation of the civilizing project of modernity, as well as the irrationality of its instrumental and scientific reason, the main responsible for the deep crisis in which humanity finds itself in the 21st century. Born in Emsdetten, Germany, his adolescence was impacted by the experience of World War II, the rise of Nazism, and the disappearance of many Jews. He completed his degree in economics, at the same time that he studied philosophy and theology in Freiburg, Hamburg and Münster.
He studied for a doctorate at the Institute for Eastern Europe at the Free University of Berlin. Later, as a research assistant, he was commissioned to study Karl Marx and Marxist thinkers in depth, responding to a project critical of real socialism. There he began his work on fetishism, the theory of value and ideology.
With Marx he not only developed a critique of the planning economy and Soviet ideology, but also of capitalist ideology and classical economic models. During his research, he discovers that real socialism and capitalism constitute two projects of domination that respond to the same modern instrumental rationality. The socialist project proposes the domination of nature, while the capitalist project proposes the domination of nature and the human being.
His presence at the Institute of Eastern Europe became untenable with the results of his research and he migrated to Latin America from the 1960s. He lived through the Chile of Salvador Allende during the coup of Augusto Pinochet and experienced the rise of neoliberalism as a totalitarianism of the market.
He settled in Costa Rica, where he founded, first, the Ecumenical Research Department, an important center for training and theoretical production linked to grassroots communities of liberation theology and social movements throughout Latin America and, later, he founded the Grupo Pensamiento Critical.
During the 70s we made contact with him, and inspired by his conference we wrote an article on Marx’s atheism and the prophets, we talked at length about being atheists before the earthly gods, there arose a deep friendship and a dialogue that was maintained until the present day. final.
It can be said that our philosophy of liberation is a disciple of Franz Hinkelammert, through his work Marx’s materialism was revealed to us, which allowed us to formulate the material principle of ethics and politics. Years later, during the 1990s, Hinkelammert was instrumental in the dialogue with Karl Otto Apel, who seemed to propose an irreversible foundation with his Discourse Ethics.
Hinkelammert intervened to show that beyond the arguing community, life is actually the last horizon of reference, prior to language and communication. Finally, Hinkelammert’s work was also key to the systematization of the principle of feasibility by showing us the importance of the horizon of impossibility for epistemological, ethical, and political reflection.
The Bolivian philosopher Juan José Bautista, a great disciple of both, called him the Marx of this time, for having developed and updated the method of Marx’s theory of fetishism. Hinkelammert takes up the critique against the earthly gods of merchandise, capital and the economy to show how fetishism would now have passed to the social sciences, to modern science and finally to modern rationality.
In this way it is that the civilizing project of modernity has been imposed throughout the world and has shielded itself from all criticism, making the ideal content of its modern way of life appear as the ideal of humanity. The foundation of modernity, Hinkelammert tells us, is theological, it is an inverted Christianity because it does not start from a God for life, but from a god who asks for the sacrifice of life, he is a god for death and for that reason it is discovered to be false, it is a fetish that embodies the projection of the bourgeois subject, a bourgeois made god.
The transformation towards which Hinkelammert summons us, is not then only of an economic, political or social model, it is about transforming the subjectivity of the human being, so that we stop embodying modern and bourgeois subjectivity towards the recovery of a community subjectivity and a rationality of life, present in the great utopias of the peoples who put the emphasis on us as an I am if you are.
It is about advancing towards a humanism of praxis in which the human being, as humus of the earth, becomes the supreme being for the human being.
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