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In the eleventh and last of the Theses on Feuerbach, we read: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ The aim of this chapter is to begin to understand why Marx did not stop there, even though, in one sense, nothing that he wrote afterwards ever went beyond the horizon of the problems posed by this formulation.

The Theses on Feuerbach

What are the Theses? A series of aphorisms that here outline a critical argument, there advance a lapidary proposition and what is, at times, almost a slogan. Their style combines the terminology of German philosophy (which sometimes makes them difficult to read today) with a direct interpellation, a resolute impulse which, in a way, mimics a liberation: a repeated exit from theory in the direction of revolutionary activity (or practice). They were written some time around March 1845, when the young scholar and political journalist from the Rhine-land was living in Brussels, under a degree of police surveillance. It would not be long before he was joined by his friend Engels, with whom he was to begin a collaboration that would last a lifetime. It does not seem he ever intended these lines for publication: they are of the order of ‘memoranda’, formulas set down on paper to be remembered and provide constant inspiration.

At this point, Marx was engaged in a project we can picture fairly clearly, thanks to the rough drafts published in 1932 which have since been known as the Economic and Philosophical (or 1844) Manuscripts.¹ This is a phenomenological analysis (aiming to establish the meaning or non-meaning) of the alienation of human labour in the form of wage labour. The influences of Rousseau, Feuerbach, Proudhon and Hegel are closely combined in these writings with his first reading of the economists (Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Ricardo, Sismondi) to produce a humanist, naturalistic conception of communism, conceived as the reconciliation of man with his own labour and with nature, and hence with his ‘species-being’ which private property had abolished, leaving him, as a result, ‘estranged from himself’.

Now, Marx was to interrupt this work (which he would resume much later on quite other foundations) and undertake with Engels the writing of The German Ideology, which mainly takes the form of a polemic against the various strands of ‘Young Hegelian’ philosophy inside and outside the university (Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, all of whom were linked to some degree to the movement opposed to the Restoration which drew its inspiration from a ‘left’ reading of the author of the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right). The composition of the Theses coincides with this interruption.² And it is probable that some of the theoretical reasons for it are to be found in the text. But it is also crucial to identify the exact relationship between the Theses and the arguments of The German Ideology.³ I shall return to this point below.

Louis Althusser, one of many well-known philosophers to have offered readings of the text, presented the Theses as the ‘bord antérieur’ – i.e. the front or anterior edge* – of a break, thus launching one of the great debates in contemporary Marxism. In his view, the 1844 Manuscripts, with their characteristic humanism, could be said to be works predating the break, while The German Ideology, or rather its first part, with its deduction of the successive forms of property and State, in which the development of the division of labour provides the guiding thread, could be said to represent the real emergence of the ‘science of history’.

I do not intend to enter into an exhaustive explication of this text here. The reader may consult the work by Georges Labica which studies each formulation in detail, taking the later commentaries with all their divergences as indicative of the internal problems these formulations pose.⁴ Labica demonstrates with perfect clarity how the Theses are structured. From beginning to end, the aim is, by invoking a ‘new’ or practical materialism, to move beyond the traditional opposition between philosophy’s ‘two camps’: idealism (i.e., chiefly, Hegel), which projects all reality into the world of spirit or mind, and the old or ‘contemplative’ materialism, which reduces all intellectual abstractions to sensuousness, i.e. to life, sensation and affectivity in the style of the Epicureans and their modern disciples (Hobbes, Diderot, Helvétius etc.).

The critique of alienation

If we refer to the debates of the period, the thread of the argument is relatively clear. Feuerbach sought to explain ‘religious alienation’, i.e. the fact that real, sensuous men represent salvation and perfection to themselves in another supra-sensuous world (as a projection of their own ‘essential qualities’ into imaginary beings and situations – in particular, the bond of community or love which unites ‘humankind’).⁵ By becoming conscious of this mistake, human beings will become capable of ‘reappropriating’ their essence which has been alienated in God and, hence, of really living out fraternity on earth. Following Feuerbach, critical philosophers (including Marx himself) attempted to extend the same schema to other phenomena of the abstraction and ‘dispossession’ of human existence. They sought, in particular, to extend it to the constitution of the political sphere, isolated from society, as an ideal community in which human beings were said to be free and equal. However, says Marx in the Theses, the real reason for this projection is not an illusion of consciousness or an effect of the individual imagination: it is the split or division which reigns in society, it is the practical conflicts which set men against each other, to which the heaven of religion – or of politics – offers a miraculous solution. They cannot really leave these divisions behind without a – practical – transformation which abolishes the dependence of certain human beings upon others. It is not, therefore, for philosophy to bring an end to alienation (since philosophy has never been anything but a commentary on – or translation of – the ideals of reconciliation in religion or politics); that is a task for revolution, the conditions for which lie in the material existence of individuals and their social relations. The Theses on Feuerbach hence demand a definitive exit (Ausgang) from philosophy, as the only means of realizing what has always been its loftiest ambition: emancipation, liberation.

Karl Marx: Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

I. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity …

III. The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

IV. Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice …

VI. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.

2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as ‘genus’, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals …

XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

(Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin/New Left Review, Harmondsworth, 1975, pp. 421–23).

Revolution against philosophy

The difficulties begin precisely at this point. There can be no doubt that Marx never ventured to publish a call for such an exit, or did not find an opportunity to do so. And yet he wrote it and, like a ‘purloined letter’, it has come down to us. Now, the statement in question is rather paradoxical. In a sense, it is absolutely consistent with itself. What it requires, it immediately does (employing a later terminology, one might be tempted to say that there is something ‘performative’ about it). To write: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’, is to posit a point of no return for all thinking that wishes to be effective, down-to-earth or ‘worldly’. It is also to forbid oneself to regress, revert to philosophy. Or, if one prefers, it is to condemn oneself, if one were by any chance to begin interpreting the world again – particularly the social world – to lapse back into the ambit of philosophy, since there is no third way between philosophy and revolution. At the outside, it may therefore mean condemning oneself to silence.

But the harshness of this alternative reveals its other side: if ‘saying is doing’,⁶ then, on the other hand, ‘doing is saying’ and words are never innocent. For example, it is not innocent to posit that the interpretations of the world are various, whereas the revolutionary transformation is, implicitly, one or univocal. For that means there is only one single way of changing the world: the one which abolishes the existing order – the revolution – which cannot be reactionary or anti-popular. Let us note, in passing, that Marx was very soon to retract this thesis: as early as the Manifesto and, a fortiori, in Capital, he was to note the power with which capitalism ‘changes the world’. And the question of whether the world cannot be changed in several different ways and of how one change can fit into another – or even divert it from its course – would become crucial. Moreover, this thesis would mean that this single transformation also provides the ‘solution’ to the internal conflicts of philosophy – and ‘revolutionary practice’ would thus realize an old ambition of philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel …) better than they could!

The critique of political economy

The expression ‘critique of political economy’ figures repeatedly in the title or programme of Marx’s main works, though its content constantly changes. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are themselves a draft of a work which was to have been entitled Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, a title later given to the work published in 1859 as the ‘first part’ of a general treatise and used as the subtitle of Capital (of which Volume 1, the only volume published by Marx himself, appeared in 1867). To these we may add a great many unpublished pieces, articles and sections in polemical works.

It seems, then, that this phrase expresses the permanent modality of Marx’s intellectual relation to his scientific object. The initial objective was the critique of political alienation in civil/bourgeois society, as well as the ‘speculative subjects’ the organic unity of which philosophy claimed to express. But a fundamental shift occurred at a very early stage: ‘criticizing’ law, morality and politics meant confronting them with their ‘materialist basis’, with the process by which social relations are constituted in labour and production.

In his own way, Marx thus discovered the dual meaning of the term critique: on the one hand, the eradication of error; on the other, knowledge of the limits of a faculty or practice. But what conducted this critique, for Marx, was no longer merely analysis, but history. This is what enabled him to combine ‘dialectically’ the critique of the necessary illusions of theory (‘commodity fetishism’), the development of the internal, irreconcilable contradictions in economic reality (crises, the antagonism between labour and capital, based on the exploitation of ‘labour-power’ as a commodity) and, finally, the outline of a ‘political economy of labour’, opposed to that of the bourgeoisie (‘Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association’, 1864). The fate of Marx’s critique is dependent on the ‘two discoveries’ he claimed: the deduction of the money form from the necessities of commodity circulation and the reduction of the laws of accumulation to the capitalization of surplus value (Mehrwert). Both are related to the definition of value as an expression of socially necessary labour, in which is rooted rejection of the viewpoint of the abstract homo oeconomicus, defined solely by the calculation of his individual ‘utility’.

For an account of the technical aspects of the critique of political economy in Marx, see Pierre Salama and Tran Hai Hac, Introduction a l’économie de Marx (La Découverte, Paris, 1992).

But there is more to it than this: it was not by chance that this formula coined by Marx, this injunction which is already, in itself, an act of ‘departure’, acquired its philosophical renown. If we search our memories a little, we can very soon find a profound kinship not only with other watchwords (such as Rimbaud’s ‘changer la vie’: we know that Andre Breton, among others, made this connection),⁷ but with some equally lapidary, philosophical propositions, which are traditionally considered ‘fundamental’ and which take the form, at times, of tautologies and, at others, of antitheses. All these formulations, different in content or opposed in intent as they may be, share a common concern with the question of the relation between theory and practice, consciousness and life. This is true from Parmenides’s ‘Thinking and being are one’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, via Spinoza (‘God is nature’), Kant (‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’), and Hegel (‘The rational is real and the real is rational’). And here is Marx ensconced not just at the heart of philosophy, but at the heart of its most speculative turn, in which it strives to think its own limits, whether to abolish them or to establish itself on the basis of a recognition of those limits.

Let us keep in mind this profound ambiguity (which we must be careful not to turn into an insurmountable contradiction, but which we must not make into a sign of unfathomable profundity either, since this would soon lead us back to that ‘mysticism’ the roots of which Marx is, in fact, seeking out here …) and let us examine more closely two key questions implied in the Theses: that of the relation between ‘practice’ (or praxis) and ‘class struggle’; and that of anthropology or the ‘human essence’.

Praxis and class struggle

The Theses speak of revolution, but they do not use the expression ‘class struggle’. It would not, however, be arbitrary to register its presence here between the lines, on condition that we clearly specify what is meant by the term in this case. Thanks to the work of scholars in the field of German studies, we have for some years now been better acquainted with the intellectual environment that gave rise to these formulations, which Marx articulated in terms that are particularly striking, but which were not absolutely his own as regards their content.⁸

The revolution Marx has in mind clearly refers to French traditions. What the young radical democrats wish to see is the revival of the movement which had been interrupted, then reversed, by the ‘bourgeois’ establishment of the republic after Thermidor, by Napoleon’s dictatorship and, finally, by the Restoration and the Counter-revolution (in any case, by the State). To be even more precise, the aim was to bring the revolutionary movement to fruition on a European scale, and to render it universal by recovering the inspiration and energy of its ‘left wing’, that egalitarian component of the Revolution (represented principally by Babeuf) from which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of communism emerged.⁹ Marx would be very emphatic that this was not a speculative conception, implying an ideal or experimental community (like Cabet’s ‘Icarie’), but a social movement with demands that were merely a coherent application of the principle of Revolution – gauging how much liberty had been achieved by the degree of equality and vice versa, with fraternity as the end result. All in all, what Marx and others come to recognize is that there is no middle way: if the revolution is halted in its course, it can only regress and reconstitute an aristocracy of owners who use the – reactionary or liberal – State to defend the established order. Conversely, the only possibility of completing the revolution and rendering it irreversible is to give it greater depth, to make it a social revolution.

But who will bring about this social revolution? Who are the heirs of Babeuf and the Montagnards? One has simply to open one’s eyes to what is currently going on in Europe, to listen to the cries of alarm of the possessing classes. They are the English ‘Chartist’ workers (whom Engels has just described in his Condition of the Working Class in England of 1844, a book which can still be read with admiration today and which had an absolutely crucial effect on Marx); they are the Canuts of Lyon, the artisans of the Parisian faubourgs and of the caves of Lille which Victor Hugo described, the Silesian weavers to whom Marx devoted long columns in his Cologne-based Rheinische Zeitung. In short, they are all those now called (from an old Roman word) proletarians, which the Industrial Revolution created in huge numbers, crowding them into its cities and plunging them into poverty, and who have now begun to shake the bourgeois order by their strikes, their ‘combinations’, their insurrections. They are, so to speak, the people of the people (le peuple du peuple), its most authentic fraction and the pre-figurement of its future. At the point when critical intellectuals, full of goodwill and illusions, are still pondering ways of democratizing the State and, to that end, of enlightening what they call ‘the masses’, those masses themselves have already gone into action; they have in fact already recommenced the revolution.

In a decisive formula which recurs in all the texts of this period, from The Holy Family (1844) to the Communist Manifesto (1847), Marx will say that this proletariat ‘represents the dissolution in action of bourgeois/civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]’, meaning by this: (1) that the conditions of existence of the proletarians (what we would today term social exclusion) are in contradiction with all the principles of that society; (2) that they themselves live by other values than those of private property, profit, patriotism and bourgeois individualism; and (3) that their growing opposition to the State and the dominant class is a necessary effect of the modern social structure, but one which will soon prove lethal for that structure.

Action in the present

The words ‘in der Tat’ (in action) are particularly important. On the one hand, they evoke the present, effective reality, the ‘facts’ (die Tatsachen): they therefore express Marx’s profoundly anti-utopian orientation and allow us to understand why the reference to the first forms of proletarian class struggle, as it was beginning to become organized, is so decisive for him. The revolutionary practice of which the Theses speak does not have to implement a programme or a plan for the reorganization of society. Still less does it need to depend upon a vision of the future offered by philosophical and sociological theories (like those of the philanthropists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). But it must coincide with ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, as Marx was soon to write in The German Ideology, explaining that this was the only materialist definition of communism.

But here we touch on the second aspect: ‘in action’ also means that we are speaking of an activity (Tätigkeit), an enterprise unfolding in the present to which individuals are committed with all their physical and intellectual powers. This represents a significant reversal. As opponents of the philosophies of history which were always ruminating on the meaning of the past, and the philosophies of right which simply provided a commentary on the established order, Moses Hess and other ‘Young Hegelians’ had proposed a philosophy of action (and Feuerbach had published a manifesto for a philosophy of the future). But, deep down, what Marx means is this: action must be ‘acted out’ in the present, not commented upon or announced. But then philosophy must give up its place. It is not a ‘philosophy of action’, but action itself, action ‘sans phrases’, which corresponds to revolutionary demands and the revolutionary movement.

And yet this injunction to give up its place cannot be ignored by philosophy: if it is consistent, philosophy must paradoxically see in that injunction its own realization. Naturally, Marx is thinking here, first and foremost, of that German idealist tradition with which his own thinking is imbued, a tradition which has such close affinities with the French revolutionary idea. He is thinking of the Kantian injunction to ‘do one’s duty’, to act in the world in conformity with the categorical imperative (the content of which is human fraternity). And also of Hegel’s phrase in the Phenomenology: ‘What must be is also in fact [in der Tat], and what only must be, without being, has no truth.’ More politically, he is thinking of the fact that modern philosophy has identified the universal with the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But these principles, sacrosanct in theory, are either ignored and contradicted at every turn by bourgeois society, where neither equality nor even liberty reigns, to say nothing of fraternity; or else they are beginning to pass into reality, but in a revolutionary, ‘insurrectionary’ practice (the practice of those who are rising up together, where necessary substituting the ‘criticism of weapons’ for the ‘weapons of criticism’). It is, first and foremost, this consequence, which is somewhat hard for philosophy to take but arises out of its own principles, that Marx has in mind when he writes here of inverting idealism to produce materialism.

The two sides of idealism

Let us halt here, once again, and examine this point. If these remarks are accurate, it means that Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter – and this will remain the case for a very long time, until Engels undertakes to reunite Marxism with the natural sciences of the second half of the nineteenth century. For the moment, however, we are dealing with a strange ‘materialism without matter’. Why, then, is this term used?

Here historians of philosophy come back into their own, in spite of the knocks they have just taken from Marx. They must explain this paradox, which also leads them to point up the imbroglio that arises from it (though, let us repeat, that imbroglio is anything but arbitrary). If Marx declared that it was a principle of materialism to change the world, seeking at the same time to differentiate his position from all existing materialism (which he terms ‘old’ materialism and which depends precisely on the idea that everything has ultimately to be explained in terms of matter – which is also an ‘interpretation of the world’ and contestable as such), this was clearly in order to take the contrary stance to that of idealism. The key to Marx’s formulations resides not in the word ‘materialism’, but in the term ‘idealism’. Once again, we must ask why this should be.

The first reason is that the idealist interpretations of nature and history proposed by philosophers invoke principles like spirit, reason, consciousness, the idea etc … And, in practice, such principles always lead not to revolution, but to the education (if not, indeed, the edification) of the masses, which the philosophers themselves generously offer to take in hand. In Plato’s time they sought to counsel princes in the name of the ideal state. In our democratic era, they seek to educate the citizens (or ‘educate the educators’ of the citizens: the judges, doctors and teachers, by assuming their position, at least morally, at the very top of the academic edifice) in the name of reason and ethics.

This is not wrong, but behind this function of idealism there is a more formidable difficulty. In modern philosophy (the philosophy which finds its true language with Kant), whether one speaks of consciousness, spirit or reason, these categories which express the universal always have two sides to them, and Marx’s formulations in the Theses constantly allude to this. They intimately combine two ideas: representation and subjectivity. It is precisely the originality and strength of the great (German) idealist tradition that it thought this combination through systematically.

Clearly, the notion of ‘interpretation’ to which Marx refers is a variant of the idea of representation. For the idealism criticized here, the world is the object of a contemplation which seeks to perceive its coherence and its ‘meaning’ and thereby, willy-nilly, to impose an order on it. Marx very clearly discerned the interdependence between the fact of thinking an ‘order of the world’ (especially in the social and political register) and the fact of valorizing order in the world: both against ‘anarchy’ and also against ‘movement’ (‘Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes’, as Baudelaire was to write)* … He also saw very clearly that, from this point of view, the ‘old materialisms’ or philosophies of nature, which substitute matter for mind as the organizing principle, contain a strong element of idealism and are, in the end, merely disguised idealisms (whatever their very different political consequences). This enables us to understand why it is so easy for idealism to ‘comprehend’ materialism and therefore to refute it or integrate it (as we see in Hegel, who has no problem with materialisms, except perhaps with that of Spinoza, but Spinoza is a rather atypical materialist…). Lastly, he saw that the heart of modern, post-revolutionary idealism consists in referring the order of the world and of ‘representation’ back to the activity of a subject who creates or, as Kantian language has it, ‘constitutes’ them.

We then come to the other side of idealism, where it is not a philosophy of representation (or, if one prefers, a mere philosophy of the primacy of ‘ideas’), but a philosophy of subjectivity (which is clearly expressed in the decisive importance assumed by the notion of consciousness). Marx thought that the subjective activity of which idealism speaks is, at bottom, the trace, the denegation (the simultaneous recognition and misrecognition) of a more real activity, an activity that is more ‘effective’, if we may venture the expression: an activity which would be at one and the same time the constitution of the external world and the formation (Bildung) or transformation of self. Witness the insistent way in which the vocabulary of the act, of action and activity (Tat, Tätigkeit, Handlung) recurs in the writings of Kant and, even more markedly, of Fichte (this is, in reality, where the ‘philosophy of action’ extolled by the Young Hegelians comes from). Witness also the way Hegel describes the mode of being of consciousness as an active experience and the function of the concept as a labour (the ‘labour of the negative’). All in all, then, it is not difficult to derive the following hypothesis from Marx’s aphorisms: just as traditional materialism in reality conceals an idealist foundation (representation, contemplation), so modern idealism in reality conceals a materialist orientation in the function it attributes to the acting subject, at least if one accepts that there is a latent conflict between the idea of representation (interpretation, contemplation) and that of activity (labour, practice, transformation, change). And what he proposes is quite simply to explode the contradiction, to dissociate representation and subjectivity and allow the category of practical activity to emerge in its own right.

The subject is practice

Did he succeed in this undertaking? In a sense, completely, since it is perfectly possible to argue that the only true subject is the practical subject or the subject of practice or, better still, that the subject is nothing other than practice which has always already begun and continues indefinitely. But does this get us out of idealism? Nothing could be less certain, precisely because, historically speaking, ‘idealism’ covers both the point of view of representation and that of subjectivity. In reality, what we have here is a circle or a theoretical interchange which functions in both directions. It is possible to say that, by identifying the essence of subjectivity with practice, and the reality of practice with the revolutionary activity of the proletariat (which is one with its very existence), Marx transferred the category of subject from idealism to materialism. But it is equally possible to assert that, precisely by so doing, he set up the permanent possibility of representing the proletariat to itself as a ‘subject’ in the idealist sense of the term (and hence, ultimately, as a representation or an abstraction by means of which the world, or the transformation of the world, is once again ‘interpreted’: is this not exactly what happened when, later, Marxist theorists, armed with the idea of class struggle, were to deduce from it a priori the ‘meaning of history’?).

There is nothing gratuitous about these dialectical games. They are closely linked to the history of the notion of revolution and, consequently, have a political aspect as well as a philosophical one. From the beginning of the modern period – that of the revolutions which are termed bourgeois, the Anglo-American and the French – the invention of the subject as the central category of philosophy, which relates to all fields of concrete experience (science, morality, law, religion, aesthetics) and makes possible their unification, is linked to the idea that humanity moulds or educates itself, to the idea that it gives itself laws and, therefore, finally to the idea that it liberates itself from the various forms of oppression, ignorance or superstition, poverty etc.¹⁰ And the generic subject of this activity always has two sides to it: the one theoretical, the other concrete and practical. In Kant, that subject was humanity; in Fichte it became at a certain point the people, the nation; and in Hegel, lastly, it was the historical peoples as successive embodiments of the ‘world-spirit’, i.e. the progress of civilization.

The fact that Marx, in his turn, recognized the proletariat as the true practical subject (we have seen above that it is the ‘people of the people’, authentically human and communal) – the subject which ‘dissolves the existing order’ and thus changes itself (Selbsttätigkeit, Selbstveränderung), while at the same time changing the world – and that he used this recognition (in which the lesson of immediate experience and the most ancient speculative tradition are superimposed in a remarkable way) to assert, in his turn, that the subject is practice, does not, however, genuinely remove him from the history of idealism. Fichte had said precisely the same thing. Without playing with words, one might even go so far as to suggest that this is what makes of Marx and his ‘materialism of practice’ the most accomplished form of the idealist tradition, the form which enables us to understand more than any other the lasting vitality of idealism right up to the present, precisely because that transposition is closely linked to the attempt to prolong the revolutionary experience and embody it in modern society, with its classes and social conflicts.

To do so would be to prepare to understand that adopting the standpoint of the proletarians in a state of ‘permanent’ insurrection resulted not so much in putting an end to idealism, but in installing the materialism/idealism dilemma – the perennial question of their difference – at the very heart of the theory of the proletariat and its privileged historical role. But, with this dilemma, we may confidently expect that philosophy, having been chased out of the door, will come back in by the window …

The reality of the ‘human essence’

Let us return to the letter of the Theses to evoke the other great question they pose: that of the human essence. The two are clearly linked. ‘Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence’, i.e. he shows, particularly in The Essence of Christianity of 1841, that the idea of God is merely a synthesis of human perfections, personified and projected out of the world. ‘But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’ (in a sort of mixture of French and German, Marx writes das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse): this thesis has been the cause of as much debate as the eleventh. There are many things worthy of comment here, if we take care to follow the letter of the text.

Marx poses the question of the essence of man, or, at least, answers that question. What could be more natural? Yet that question, which we might regard as being constitutive of anthropology, is not at all straightforward. In a sense, it is as old as philosophy. But when, in our own day, Claude Lévi-Strauss explains that the essence of man is the conflict between nature and culture; or when Lacan coins the word parlêtre to say that the essence of man is constituted through and through by language, they place themselves in the same tradition as Aristotle defining man by the fact of his having the power of speech and being a member of the polis, or St. Augustine defining man as the ‘image and resemblance of God on earth’. Moreover, if we take things at a sufficient level of generality, they are all dealing with the same question. From Antiquity to our own times, there is a long succession of definitions of human nature or the human essence. Marx himself will advance several, each of them revolving around the relation between labour and consciousness. In Volume 1 of Capital he will cite a very characteristic definition by Benjamin Franklin (man is ‘a toolmaking animal’), not to reject it, but to complement it by specifying that technology has a history which is dependent on the ‘mode of production’, and going on to recall that neither technology nor technical progress can exist without consciousness, reflection, experimentation and knowledge.¹¹ And in The German Ideology, not long after the formulation we are examining here, he wrote:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.¹²

This is a way of seeking the answer to the question of the essence of man in things themselves – which has, indeed, provided a starting-point for a whole biological and technological anthropology, both Marxist and non-Marxist alike.

Theoretical humanism

Yet a nuance crucial to understanding the import of our text here separates the mere fact of defining man or human nature from the fact of explicitly posing the question ‘What is man?’ (or ‘What is the human essence?’) and, a fortiori, making this the fundamental philosophical question. If we, in fact, make it such, we enter upon a new problematic which we might, with Althusser, call a theoretical humanism. Astonishing as it may seem, such a problematic is relatively recent and at the point when Marx was writing, it was not very old at all, since it only dates from the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany the most important names are those of Kant (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798), Wilhelm von Humboldt¹³ and Feuerbach, which indicates that the trajectory of theoretical humanism connects with that of idealism and its refutation. The parallel is an illuminating one. We see in effect that, where the rival (spiritualist, materialist) theories of human nature are concerned, Marx will proceed to a critique of the same order as the one he carried out on the theories of the subject, of activity and sensuous intuition. To say that, ‘in its effective reality’ (in seiner Wirklichkeit), the human essence is the ensemble of social relations is clearly not to reject the question. But it is to attempt radically to displace the way in which it has until now been understood, not only where ‘man’ is concerned, but also as regards ‘essence’.

Philosophers have formed a false idea of what an essence is (and this error is so … essential to them that one can hardly imagine a philosophy without it). They have thought, firstly, that the essence is an idea or an abstraction (one would say today, in a different terminology, a universal concept), under which may be ranged, in a declining order of generality, specific differences and, finally, individual differences; and, secondly, that this generic abstraction is somehow ‘inherent’ (innewoh-nend) in individuals of the same genus, either as a quality they possess, by which they may be classified, or even as a form or a force which causes them to exist as so many copies of the same model.

We can see, then, the meaning of the strange equation made by Marx. At bottom, the words ‘ensemble’, ‘social’ and ‘relations’ all say the same thing. The point is to reject both of the positions (the realist and the nominalist) between which philosophers have generally been divided: the one arguing that the genus or essence precedes the existence of individuals; the other that individuals are the primary reality, from which universals are ‘abstracted’. For, amazingly, neither of these two positions is capable of thinking precisely what is essential in human existence: the multiple and active relations which individuals establish with each other (whether of language, labour, love, reproduction, domination, conflict etc.), and the fact that it is these relations which define what they have in common, the ‘genus’. They define this because they constitute it at each moment in multiple forms. They thus provide the only ‘effective’ content of the notion of essence applied to the human being (i.e. to human beings).

The transindividual

Let us not go into the question of whether this point of view is absolutely original and specific to Marx here. What is certain is that it has consequences both in the field of philosophical discussion (at the level of what is called ‘ontology’),¹⁴ and in that of politics. The words Marx uses reject both the individualist point of view (primacy of the individual and, especially, the fiction of an individuality which could be defined in itself, in isolation, whether in terms of biology, psychology, economic behaviour or whatever), and the organicist point of view (which, today, following Anglo-American usage, is also called the holistic point of view: the primacy of the whole, and particularly of society considered as an indivisible unity of which individuals are merely the functional members).¹⁵ Marx will embrace neither the ‘monad’ of Hobbes and Bentham, nor the ‘grand être’ of Auguste Comte. It is significant that Marx (who spoke French almost as fluently as he did German) should have resorted to the foreign word ‘ensemble’ here, clearly in order to avoid using the German ‘das Ganze’, the ‘whole’ or totality.

Perhaps things would be clearer formally (though not in their content) if we, in our turn, added a word to the text – if need be by inventing that word – to characterize the constitutive relation which displaces the question of the human essence while, at the same time, providing a formal answer to it (and one which thus contains in embryo another problematic than that of theoretical humanism). The word does in fact exist, but is to be found in twentieth-century thinkers (Kojève, Simondon, Lacan …): we have, in fact, to think humanity as a transindividual reality and, ultimately, to think transindividuality as such.¹⁶ Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or a substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.

Althusser

Louis Althusser (born, Birmandreis, Algeria, 1918; died, Paris, 1990) is better known today by the general public for the tragedies which marked the end of his life (the murder of his wife, his internment in a psychiatric institution; see his autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey, Chatto and Windus, London, 1993) than for his theoretical works. Those works did, however, occupy a central place in the philosophical debates of the sixties and seventies after the publication in 1965 of For Marx and (with Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital (trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1970). At that point he was one of the leading figures of ‘structuralism’, alongside Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Barthes. Acknowledging that Marxism was in crisis, but refusing to attribute the cause of that crisis to mere dogmatization, he undertook a re-reading of Marx. Borrowing the notion of ‘epistemological break’ from historical epistemology (Bachelard), he interpreted the Marxian critique of political economy as a rupture with the theoretical humanism and historicism of idealist philosophies (including Hegel), and as the foundation of a science of history whose central categories are the ‘overdetermined contradiction’ of the mode of production and the ‘structure in dominance’ of social formations. Such a science stands opposed to bourgeois ideology, but at the same time demonstrates the materiality and historical efficacity of ideologies, defined as ‘the imaginary relation of individuals and classes to their conditions of existence’. Just as there is no end of history, so there cannot be any end of ideology. Althusser simultaneously proposed a reevaluation of the Leninist theses on philosophy, which he defined as ‘class struggle in theory’ (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1971), and he used this to analyse the contradictions between ‘materialist tendencies’ and ‘idealist tendencies’ within scientific practice (Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1974), trans. Warren Montag, Verso, London, 1990). In a later phase, under the influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the May 1968 movements, Althusser criticized what he now considered to be the ‘theoreticist deviation’ of his earliest essays, a deviation he attributed to the influence of Spinoza at the expense of dialectics (‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, New Left Books, London, 1976). Reaffirming the difference between Marxism and humanism, he outlined a general theory of ideology as the ‘interpellation of individuals as subjects’ and as a system of both public and private institutions ensuring the reproduction of social relations (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970), in Essays on Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster, Verso, London, 1984).

An ontology of relations

Here, we must admit, an ‘ontology’ is taking shape. However, for the discussion of the relations between the individual and the genus, it substitutes a programme of enquiry into this multiplicity of relations, which are so many transitions, transferences or passages in which the bond of individuals to the community is formed and dissolved, and which, in its turn, constitutes them. What is most striking in such a perspective is that it establishes a complete reciprocity between these two poles, which cannot exist without one another and are therefore in and of themselves mere abstractions, albeit necessary abstractions for thinking the relation or relationship (Verhältnis).

At this point, speculative as it may seem, we are in fact closer than ever, by a characteristic short-circuit, to the question of politics. Not only are the relations of which we are speaking in fact nothing other than differentiated practices, singular actions of individuals on one another; but this transindividual ontology has at least a resonance with statements like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (often quite wrongly considered an ‘individualist’ text) and, even more, with the practice of revolutionary movements – a practice which never opposes the individual’s self-realization to the interests of the community, and indeed does not even separate these, but always seeks to accomplish the one by accomplishing the other. For, though it is true that only individuals can, in the last analysis, possess rights and formulate demands, the winning of those rights or liberation (even insurrection) is no less necessarily collective.

It will doubtless be objected that this formulation does not describe an existing state of affairs or, even less, a system of institutions, but rather a process (at least as experienced by those taking part in it). But this is exactly what Marx intends. And in these circumstances one can see that the sixth thesis, which identifies the human essence with ‘the ensemble of social relations’, and the third, eighth and eleventh theses, which link all thought to revolutionary practice and change, are, in reality, saying basically the same thing. Let us risk the expression, then, and say that social relations as designated here are nothing but an endless transformation, a ‘permanent revolution’ (the term was doubtless not invented by Marx, but it would play a decisive role in his thinking up to around 1850). For the Marx of March 1845, it is not enough to say with Hegel that ‘the real is rational’ and that the rational, of necessity, becomes reality: one has to say that the only thing which is real or rational is revolution.

Stirner’s objection

What more could one ask? I have said above, however, that Marx could not leave matters there: we now have to understand why this is the case. We should not arrive at such an understanding if we were content merely to show that by substituting practice for the subject, a circle or logical difficulty is generated, or that there is a danger that the notion of essence will be left in a state of disequilibrium, caught between the internal critique of traditional ontology and its dissolution into the multiplicity of concrete investigations of social relations. Without doubt, The German Ideology is a text very close in inspiration to the Theses on Feuerbach and yet it already speaks another language. The formal reasons we have just mentioned are not sufficient to explain this.

I believe there is a very precise conjunctural reason for it, but one which served to bring out a deep-seated problem. Some historians of Marx’s philosophy (particularly Auguste Cornu) have clearly seen this, though many have under-estimated or not been aware of it, mainly because it is usually only the first part of the text that is read. A long tradition has accustomed us to regarding this section (‘A. Concerning Feuerbach’) as a free-standing exposition of ‘historical materialism’, whereas it is essentially a response, and often a difficult one (as readers will have learnt to their cost), to the challenge posed by another theorist. That theorist, the force of whose argument it is now time to gauge, is Max Stirner (the pseudonym of Caspar Schmidt), the author of The Ego and its Own, published at the end of 1844.¹⁷ But it was some months later, just after the Theses were written, and on Engels’s insistence, that Marx began to wrestle with that book.

From a theoretical perspective who is Stirner? First of all, he is an anarchist, a defender of the autonomy of society – composed of individuals, all of whom are singular and the ‘owners’ of their bodies, needs and ideas – against the modern State, in which, as he sees it, all domination is concentrated and which has taken over the sacred attributes of power elaborated by the political theology of the Middle Ages. But, above all, Stirner is a radical nominalist: by this we mean that in his view, every ‘generality’, every ‘universal concept’ is a fiction concocted by institutions to dominate (by organizing, classifying, simplifying, if not indeed merely by naming) the only natural reality, i.e. the multiplicity of individuals of whom each is ‘unique of his kind’ (hence Stirner’s essential play on words here, which has in fact a long history: what is proper to each individual is his/her property).

We saw a moment ago that Marx was developing a notion of social relation which, at least in principle, rejected both nominalism and essentialism. But Stirner’s critique poses a formidable challenge to Marx because it is not content merely to target traditional metaphysical ‘non-particulars’ (all of them more or less theological: Being, Substance, the Idea, Reason, Good), but encompasses all universal notions without exception, thereby anticipating certain of Nietzsche’s arguments and what is today known as postmodernism. Stirner wants none of these beliefs, Ideas or ‘meta-narratives’, whether they concern God or Man, Church or State, or Revolution either. And there is, indeed, no logical difference between Christianity, humanity, the people, society, the nation or the proletariat, any more than there is between the rights of man or communism: all these universal notions are indeed abstractions which, from Stirner’s viewpoint, means that they are fictions. And these fictions are used to substitute for individuals and the thought of individuals, which is why Stirner’s book was to continue to fuel critiques from both left and right, which argued that nothing is to be gained by exchanging the cult of abstract humanity for an equally abstract cult of revolution or revolutionary practice, and that by doing so one may indeed be running the risk of an even more perverse domination.

It is certain that Marx and Engels could not sidestep this objection, for they aspired to be critics both of the idealism and essentialism of the philosophers and of the communists (more precisely the humanist communists). We have seen that this dual perspective was at the heart of the category which had just emerged for Marx as the ‘solution’ to the enigmas of philosophy: revolutionary practice. How, then, did he respond to this challenge? By transforming his symbolic notion of ‘praxis’ into a historical and sociological concept of production and by posing a question unprecedented in philosophy (even if the term was not absolutely new) – the question of ideology.

(The) German Ideology

These two moves are, of course, closely interlinked. The one constantly presupposes the other and this is what gives The German Ideology its coherence, despite its unfinished and unbalanced composition (Chapter 3 on Stirner, ‘Saint Max’, alone occupies almost two-thirds of the work and largely consists in verbal jousting with the typically ‘ironic’ argumentation of The Ego and its Own, the outcome of which, from the strictly rhetorical point of view, is rather inconclusive). The work is entirely organized around the notion of production, taken here in a general sense to refer to any human activity of formation and transformation of nature. It is no exaggeration to say that, after the ‘ontology of praxis’ heralded in the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology sets out an ‘ontology of production’ since, as Marx himself tells us, it is production which shapes man’s being (his Sein, to which he will oppose his consciousness: Bewusst-sein, literally, his ‘being conscious’). It is, more exactly, the production of his own means of existence, an activity at once personal and collective (transindividual) which transforms him at the same time as it irreversibly transforms nature and which, in this way, constitutes ‘history’.

Conversely, however, Marx will show that ideology is itself produced, before constituting itself as an autonomous structure of production (the ‘products’ of which are ideas, collective consciousness: this is the object of the theory of intellectual labour). The critique of ideology is the necessary precondition for a knowledge of social being as development of production: from its immediate forms, linked to the subsistence of individuals, to its most mediated forms, which play only an indirect role in the reproduction of human life. To gain access to this guiding thread of the whole of history, it is not enough to contemplate the facts; one can only get to it through the critique of the dominant ideology, because this latter is both an inversion of reality and an autonomization of the ‘intellectual products’ in which the trace of the real origin of ideas has been lost and which denies the very existence of that origin.

This is why I spoke above of a reciprocal presupposition. At the same time, however, Stirner’s objection can be rejected, because the point is no longer to denounce the abstraction of ‘universals’, of ‘generalities’, of ‘idealities’, by showing that that abstraction substitutes itself for real individuals; it now becomes possible to study the genesis of those abstractions, their production by individuals, as a function of the collective or social conditions in which they think and relate to one another. And, as a result, instead of being endlessly faced with an all-or-nothing choice (either accepting or rejecting all abstractions en bloc), one has a criterion by which it is possible to discriminate between those abstractions which represent real knowledge and those which merely have a function of misrecognition or mystification; and, even better, to discriminate between circumstances in which the use of abstractions is mystificatory and those in which it is not. The nihilism inherent in Stirner’s position is thus averted at a fundamental level, without the need for a radical critique of the dominant ideas being contested. Indeed, that need is clearly recognized.

The revolutionary overturning of history

The German Ideology takes the form, then, of an account of the genesis, both logical and historical, of social forms, the guiding thread of which is the development of the division of labour. Each new stage in the division of labour characterizes a certain mode of production and exchange – hence a periodization which is, inevitably, very reminiscent of the Hegelian philosophy of history. Rather than a mere narrative of the stages of universal history, what we have here in fact (as in Hegel) are the typical moments of the process by which history became universalized, became the history of humanity. However, the content of the exposition is as far removed as can be from the Hegelian objective spirit. For that universalization does not consist in the formation of a Rechtstaat rationally extending its powers over the whole of society and ‘totalizing’ the activities of that society. On the contrary, such a juridico-statist universality seemed to Marx the ideological inversion par excellence of social relations. The point is, rather, that history has become the interaction, the interdependence of all the individuals and all the groups belonging to humanity.

Marx’s erudition, already great, was mobilized to demonstrate that the counterpart to the division of labour was the development of forms of ownership (from communal or State ownership to private ownership formally open to all). Each mode of production implies a historical form of appropriation and ownership, which is merely another way of looking at the question. Consequently, it is precisely the division of labour which governs the constitution and dissolution of the larger and larger, less and less ‘natural’ social groups, from primitive communities to classes, by way of the various guilds, orders or estates (Stände) … Each of these groups, ‘dominant’ or ‘dominated’, must be understood, all in all, as a two-sided, contradictory reality: both as a form of relative universalization and as a form of limitation or particularization of human relations. Their series is therefore merely the great process of negation of particularity and particularism, but a negation through the experience and complete realization of their forms.

The starting-point of this development was the productive activity of human beings contending with nature: what Marx calls the real premiss (wirkliche Voraussetzung), which he stresses at length, against the illusions of a philosophy ‘devoid of premises’.¹⁸ As for its end point, that is ‘bourgeois/civil’ society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), which is founded on the different forms of ‘intercourse’ (Verkehr: which might also be translated as communication) between competing private owners. Or rather, the end point is the contradiction such a society harbours within it. For individuality, considered as an absolute, amounts in practice for the masses to an absolute precariousness or ‘contingency’ of the conditions of existence, just as ownership (of oneself, of objects) amounts to a generalized dispossession.

One of the great theses of The German Ideology, taken directly from the liberal tradition but turned against it, is that ‘bourgeois’ society is irreversibly established once class differences prevail over all others and in practice sweep them away. The State itself, no matter how overgrown it may seem, is now merely a function of those differences. It is at this point that the contradiction between particularism and universality, cultivation and brutishness, openness and exclusion is at its most acute, and that between wealth and poverty, the universal circulation of goods and the restriction of access to them, the apparently unlimited productivity of labour and the worker’s confinement in a narrow specialism becomes explosive. Each individual, wretched as he or she may be, has become potentially a representative of humankind, and the function of each group is defined on a world scale. History is then on the point of emerging from its own ‘prehistory’.

The whole argument of The German Ideology tends in fact to demonstrate that this situation is as such intolerable but that, by the development of its own logic, it contains the premisses of a revolutionary overturning (Umwälzung) which would amount, quite simply, to the substitution of communism for bourgeois/civil society. The transition to communism is therefore imminent once the forms and contradictions of bourgeois/civil society are completely developed. In fact, the society in which exchange has become universal is also a society in which ‘universal development of [the] productive forces’ has occurred. Throughout the whole of history, the social ‘productive forces’, expressing themselves in all fields, from technology to science and art, are only ever the forces of many individuals. But they are henceforth inoperative as the forces of isolated individuals; they can only take shape and exert their effects in a virtually infinite network of interactions between human beings. The ‘resolution’ of the contradiction cannot consist in a return to narrower forms of human activity and life, but only in a collective mastery of the ‘totality of the productive forces’.

The proletariat, universal class

This can be put another way: the proletariat constitutes the universal class of history, an idea which is nowhere given more articulate and complete expression in Marx’s work than in this text. The imminence of revolutionary transformation and of communism is, in fact, based on this perfect coincidence in the same present time of the universalization of exchange and – ranged against a bourgeois class which has raised particular interest as such to universality – a ‘class’ which has, by contrast, no particular interest to defend. Deprived of all status and all property, and therefore of any ‘particular quality’ (Eigenschaft), the proletarian potentially possesses them all. Practically no longer existing at all through himself, he exists potentially through all other human beings. Let us note here that the German for ‘propertyless’ is eigentumslos. In spite of the sarcastic remarks Marx directed at Stirner, it is impossible here not to hear the same play on words as the latter had used – and abused. But it is turned round in the opposite direction now – against ‘private property’:

Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities.¹⁹

Negative universality is converted into positive universality, deprivation into appropriation, loss of individuality into the ‘many-sided’ development of individuals, each of whom is a unique manifold of human relations.

Such a reappropriation can only occur for each person if it simultaneously occurs for all. ‘Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.’²⁰ This explains why the revolution is not just communist in its outcome, but also in its form. Will it be said that it must inevitably represent a decrease of freedom for individuals? On the contrary, it is the true liberation. For bourgeois/civil society destroys freedom at the very moment it proclaims it as its principle; whereas in communism, which is the revolutionary overthrow of that society, freedom becomes effective liberty because it responds to an intrinsic need for which that same society has created the conditions. ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’²¹

The thesis of the proletariat as ‘universal class’ thus condenses the arguments which allow Marx to present the condition of the worker, or rather the condition of the wage-labourer, as the final stage in the whole process of the division of labour – the ‘decomposition’ of civil society.²² It also allows Marx to read off from the present the imminence of the communist revolution. The ‘party’ of the same name, for which, with Engels, he went on to draft the Manifesto, will not be a ‘separate’ party; it will not have ‘interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole’;²³ it will not establish ‘sectarian principles’, but it will quite simply be this real movement come to maturity, become manifest for itself and for society as a whole.

The unity of practice

At the same time, a theory is also outlined here which – though it vigorously rejects the label of philosophy – nonetheless represents a new departure in philosophy. Marx has exited from the exit from philosophy. But he has not simply come back inside … We can demonstrate this by raising here a very old issue in dialectical thought. As I have said above, though the notion of praxis or revolutionary practice declared with unrivalled clarity that the aim of ‘changing the world’ had put paid to all essentialist philosophy, it was still, paradoxically, liable to present itself as another name for the human essence. This tension increased with the notion of production, as now analysed by Marx. Not only because there is a whole empirical history of production (which will oblige the philosopher to become an economist, historian, technologist, ethnologist etc.), but, above all, because Marx removed one of philosophy’s most ancient taboos: the radical distinction between praxis and poiêsis.

Since the Greeks (who made it the privilege of ‘citizens’, i.e. of the masters), praxis had been that ‘free’ action in which man realizes and transforms only himself, seeking to attain his own perfection. As for poiêsis (from the verb poiein: to make), which the Greeks considered fundamentally servile, this was ‘necessary’ action, subject to all the constraints of the relationship with nature, with material conditions. The perfection it sought was not that of man, but of things, of products for use.

Here, then, is the basis of Marx’s materialism in The German Ideology (which is, effectively, a new materialism): not a mere inversion of the hierarchy – a ‘theoretical workerism’, if I can put it thus (as has been the charge of Hannah Arendt and others²⁴), i.e. a primacy accorded to poiêsis over praxis by virtue of its direct relationship with matter – but the identification of the two, the revolutionary thesis that praxis constantly passes over into poiêsis and vice versa. There is never any effective freedom which is not also a material transformation, which is not registered historically in exteriority. But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence while maintaining an invariant ‘essence’.