Giovanni Gentile’s Criticism of Marxism

by Momcilo Nevsky and Zoltanous

Giovanni Gentile, before his later “Philosopher of Fascism” title, eviscerated Karl Marx’s philosophy in two monographs from 1897 and 1899, a mere 14 years after Marx’s 1883 death. These early works, untranslated into English until 2017, reveal Gentile’s surgical mastery of philosophy and the era’s intellectual currents. Sharing a Hegelian lineage — Gentile had studied Hegel’s works under Donato Jaja at the University of Pisa in the 1890s — Gentile understood Marx with a clarity that A. James Gregor argued surpassed most anti-Marxists and many Marxists. Lenin said Gentile’s The Philosophy of Marx was a critical read in a 1914 encyclopedia entry, despite their opposing views, noting its focus on neglected aspects of Marx’s materialist dialectics, such as the interplay of consciousness and matter. Gentile’s foresight was chilling — Marx’s unpublished manuscripts, released by the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1939, confirmed Gentile’s view of Marx as a confused neo-Hegelian, not a vulgar materialist, proving the adage: “Marx was a bad Marxist.”

Gentile targeted Marx’s historical materialism — later dubbed dialectical materialism, a term Marx never used, coined by Joseph Dietzgen in 1887 and adopted by Engels in 1888. Merriam-Webster defines it as a theory where political and historical events stem from social conflicts driven by material needs, resolved through contradictions. Engels described it as an eternal cycle of moving matter, where life and consciousness are fleeting, and only matter’s laws endure:

"It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation. A cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes."

— Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature

Italian thinkers Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce debated whether historical materialism was a true philosophy of history, like Hegel’s or Vico’s. Labriola argued it was in his 1896 essays; Croce dismissed it as economic determinism in a 1897 lecture, saying it was useful for historians but incapable of guiding socialism or predicting the future. Gentile sided with Labriola, arguing Marx — whose 1845–1846 drafts with Engels were steeped in Hegel’s dialectical method — saw history as a dialectical unfolding of class contradictions and resolutions, making it a revolutionary doctrine for communists. Gentile noted Marx didn’t craft a formal ethical system like Kant’s categorical imperative or Aristotle’s virtue ethics, but argued historical materialism subjects morality to historical context, with communism’s ethics rooted in class struggle as it drives toward its historical turning point — Marx himself framed this as a moral imperative in 1848: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”:

"Now what does it mean, towards historical materialism, as towards every philosophy of history, that morality is a fact? Fact means history; and history is what historical materialism must study and elucidate, not what it must produce; it is its content, its presupposition, not its product; and what is presupposed cannot be denied. [...] Thus conceived, historical materialism must account for itself and for the whole of life; and as in life there is the beautiful and the good and the ugly and the bad, it must explain the beautiful and the ugly, and the good and the bad, that is, it must assign them a legitimate place."

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Gentile’s defense was a trap — he argued Marx’s materialism guts his system. Unlike Hegel’s absolute, which develops dialectically across history, Marx’s relative can’t sustain a philosophy of history; predictions about material events, like economic shifts, collapse into mere forecasting, not metaphysics. Hegel’s system tracks the immaterial spirit’s development; Marx’s, chained to matter, reduces to historiography, lacking philosophical depth. Gentile called this a “wretched deviation” of Hegelian thought, a view Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro supports, arguing Marx’s idealism persists despite his materialist claims.

Diego Fusaro on How Marx Was an Idealist

Gentile’s sharpest strike came through Marx’s philosophy of praxis — human activity over theory — rooted in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, an 11-point manuscript discovered by Engels in 1888, where Marx declared philosophers must change the world, not just describe it. Drawing on Feuerbach, a Left Hegelian whose 1841 work shaped Marx’s concept of alienation by arguing religion projects human essence onto a divine other, Gentile saw Marx critique Feuerbach’s vulgar materialism for its latent idealism, leaning toward praxis as active engagement. Gentile traced praxis to Socrates’s dialectical method in Plato’s dialogues from 380 BCE, where knowledge emerges through questioning, but argued Marx’s materialist twist — tying reality to sensory activity, not thought — dooms it. Marx’s praxis links subject and object dialectically, transforming both, but his materialist metaphysics — replacing Hegel’s spirit with sense — implodes: if reality is sensory, matter exists beyond sense, undermining his foundation. Philip Spratt reinforced this flaw, arguing that if consciousness is just physiological, as Marx’s materialism demands, its truths — including Marxism itself — are unreliable, rendering the entire philosophy self-contradictory:

"Dialectical materialism claims to have freed Hegel’s dialectic from the errors due to his idealism. But these doctrines—the sovereignty of thought, the dialectic as a superior mode of understanding, the identity of being and knowing, the emergence of truth from error, and knowledge and practice as a single process approaching truth asymptotically—are all plausible only in a context of idealistic monism. In a materialistic system there is no more reason why the human intellect should be sovereign than the dog’s or the ant’s intellect: dogs and ants are part of nature, too. The dialectic is an infallible guide only if it embodies the self-movement of the idea: otherwise it is just as likely to lead to error as to truth… [Marx’s] argument, that in materialism physiological processes determine thought, has been used by McTaggart to disprove materialism. These processes proceed according to the laws of physiology, not of logic, and accordingly are not likely to give truth. If, then, our ideas are physiological processes, those ideas will be unreliable, and in particular the doctrine of materialism will be unreliable. Hence, materialism is self-contradictory."

— Philip Spratt, Diamat as Philosophy of Nature

Gentile’s own critique aligns with Spratt’s logic, emphasizing that Marx’s materialist lens ruins his praxis. Gentile’s later Actual Idealism, where thought alone is real, resolves this, but Marx’s incoherent mix of idealism and materialism fails:

"In Marx, praxis is synonymous with human sensory activity… Reality … is a subjective production of man; a production, however, of sensory activity; not of thought, as Hegel and other idealists believed."

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Lenin argued in 1909 that consciousness is a byproduct of matter like brain and nerves, clashing with Gentile’s view of Marx’s dialectical subject-object interplay. In 1914, Lenin claimed Marx rejected idealism outright, a stark misread:

"Sensation depends on the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e., on matter organised in a definite way. The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way. Such are the views of materialism in general, and of Marx and Engels in particular."

— Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism

"Marx decidedly rejected, idealism."

— Vladimir Lenin, A Brief Biographical Sketch With An Exposition of Marxism

The Soviet Union’s 1932–1939 release of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology — texts unavailable to Gentile or Lenin — vindicated Gentile. Gareth Stedman Jones argued these works, like the Theses, show Marx critiquing vulgar materialism, aligning with Gentile over Lenin. Lucio Colletti noted the Manuscripts faced a cold Stalin-era reception for lacking Engels’s “dialectics of nature” — Engels claimed three universal laws of dialectics: quantity into quality, interpenetration of opposites, negation of negation — with East German authorities sidelining them from Marx’s main works in the 1950s. A. James Gregor added that Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, burned his letters in 1895 to avoid “embarrassing” Engels, hinting at rifts — Engels claimed in 1885 that Marx developed a “materialist conception,” but Marx’s 1844–1845 notes leaned idealist. Soviet archivist David Riazanov fabricated chapters in The German Ideology, adding a section titled “I. Feuerbach” in 1924, a distortion Terrell Carver exposed in 1983. Georg Lukács admitted in 1923 that Marx’s early works reveal a Hegelian idealism that later Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy suppressed:

"According to Engels, [Marx] developed his new ‘materialist conception of history’ between his completion of The Holy Family in the autumn of 1844 and his reunion with Engels in Brussels in the spring of 1845. During these months, Karl did not publish anything. The only piece of relevant documentation, which Engels discovered when going through papers dating from that period, was a two-page entry in one of Karl’s notebooks, entitled Ad Feuerbach."

"But it has recently been demonstrated that it was ‘factitiously’ put together by Riazanov and his associates in the 1920s. The purpose of its publication during the early years of the Soviet Union was to complete the exposition of ‘Marxism’ as a system by connecting what Karl in 1859 had called a process of ‘self clarification’ with Engels’ claim about Karl’s development of ‘the materialist conception of history’ in 1885."

— Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

"The immediate reasons for the resistances and perplexities they aroused in Marxist circles were certainly of a theoretical nature… Nevertheless, the sheer rigidity of official doctrine, the rigor mortis which already gripped Marxism under Stalin, contributed in no small way to the cool reception which the writings met with… What made the [Manuscripts of 1844] appear so 'out of line' with Marxism was their profound dissimilarity to 'dialectical materialism'. They said nothing at all about the dialectics of nature; nothing which prepared the way for Engels's theory of the three basic dialectical laws of the universe."

— Lucio Colletti, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"We do know that Marx did not confide all his opinions to Engels and what the judgment on the epistemology of his compatriot might have been we shall probably never know, since Marx's daughter took it upon herself to destroy her father's correspondence with his wife; a vandalism undertaken in order to avoid 'embarrassment' to Engels."

— A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile and The Philosophy of The Young Karl Marx

Gentile’s final verdict was merciless: Marx’s philosophy is an “eclecticism of contradictory elements,” a mix of fruitful ideas that don’t cohere, unworthy of the label “Marxism” as a realistic philosophy. Louis Althussers argued in 1965 that Marx’s early works show a “humanist” bent at odds with later materialism. Leszek Kołakowski noted historical materialism rests on an unproven assumption — that material conditions determine consciousness — lacking empirical grounding. Karl Popper argued Marx’s historical materialism is unfalsifiable, making it pseudoscientific, as it can’t be tested or disproven. Isaiah Berlin added in 1939 that Marx’s attempt to merge Hegelian dialectics with materialism creates an “unstable synthesis,” as the two frameworks are fundamentally incompatible. Gentile’s early insight —Marx as a failed Hegelian — cuts to the core, proving his philosophy a bankrupt fraud:

"We will say, therefore, in conclusion, that an eclecticism of contradictory elements is the general character of this philosophy of Marx; of which some of his disciples today are perhaps not greatly wrong in not knowing what to do. There are many fruitful ideas at its foundation, which taken separately are worthy of meditation: but isolated they do not belong, as has been proved, to Marx, nor can they therefore justify that word 'Marxism,' which is sought to be synonymous with a purely realistic philosophy."

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx