Читать книгу The Philosophy of Marx - Étienne Balibar - Страница 9

The general idea of this little book is to understand and explain why Marx will still be read in the twenty-first century, not only as a monument of the past, but as a contemporary author – contemporary both because of the questions he poses for philosophy and because of the concepts he offers it. Limiting myself to what seem to me the essentials, I would like to give readers a means of finding their bearings in Marx’s writings and introduce them to the debates which they have prompted. I would also like to defend a somewhat paradoxical thesis: whatever may have been thought in the past, there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before.

We have first to come to some understanding on the meaning of ‘Marxist philosophy’. This expression might refer to two quite different things, though the tradition of orthodox Marxism, which developed at the end of the nineteenth century and was institutionalized by the Communist state-parties after 1931 and 1945, considered them indissociable: the ‘world-view’ of the socialist movement, based on the idea of the historic role of the working class, and the system attributed to Marx. Let us note right away that neither of these ideas is strictly connected with the other. Various terms have been invented to express the philosophical content common to Marx’s work and to the political and social movement which acted in his name: the most famous of these is ‘dialectical materialism’, a relatively late term and one inspired by the use Engels had made of various of Marx’s formulations. Others have contended that, strictly speaking, Marxist philosophy is not to be found in Marx’s writings, but emerged retrospectively, as a more general and more abstract reflection on the meaning, principles and universal significance of his work; or, indeed, that it still remains to be constituted or formulated in systematic fashion.¹ Conversely, there has never been any shortage of philologists or critical thinkers to emphasize the distance between the content of Marx’s texts and their later ‘Marxist’ fate, and to show that the existence of a philosophy in Marx in no way implies the subsequent existence of a Marxist philosophy.

This debate may be settled in a manner as simple as it is radical. The events which marked the end of the great cycle during which Marxism functioned as an organizational doctrine (1890–1990), have added nothing new to the discussion itself, but have swept away the interests which opposed its being opened up. There is, in reality, no Marxist philosophy, either as the world-view of a social movement, or as the doctrine or system of an author called Marx. Paradoxically, however, this negative conclusion, far from nullifying or diminishing the importance of Marx for philosophy, greatly increases it. Freed from an illusion and an imposture, we gain a theoretical universe.

Philosophy and non-philosophy

A new difficulty awaits us here. Marx’s theoretical thinking presented itself, at various points, not as a philosophy, but as an alternative to philosophy, a non-philosophy or even an anti-philosophy. And it has perhaps been the greatest anti-philosophy of the modern age. For Marx, philosophy as he had learnt it, from the tradition which ran from Plato to Hegel, including more or less dissident materialists like Epicurus or Feuerbach, was in fact merely an individual undertaking aimed at interpreting the world. At best this led to leaving the world as it was; at worst, to transfiguring it.

However, opposed as he was to the traditional form and usages of philosophical discourse, there can be little doubt that he did himself interlace his historico-social analyses and proposals for political action with philosophical statements. He has been sufficiently criticized by positivism for doing this. What we need to establish, then, is whether these statements form a coherent whole. My hypothesis is that this is not the case at all, at least if the idea of coherence to which we are referring continues to be informed by the idea of a system. Having broken with a certain form of philosophy, Marx was not led by his theoretical activity towards a unified system, but to an at least potential plurality of doctrines which has left his readers and successors in something of a quandary. Similarly, it did not lead him to a uniform discourse, but to a permanent oscillation between ‘falling short of’ and ‘going beyond’ philosophy. By falling short of philosophy, I mean stating propositions as ‘conclusions without premisses’, as Spinoza and Althusser would have put it. One example is the famous formula from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which Sartre, among others, considered the central thesis of historical materialism: ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.’² By going beyond philosophy, on the other hand, I mean a discourse which shows that philosophy is not an autonomous activity, but one determined by the position it occupies in the field of social conflicts and, in particular, in that of the class struggle.

Dialectical materialism

This term was used to refer to philosophy in the official doctrine of the Communist parties, and it has also been employed by a number of critics of that doctrine (see Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (1940) trans. John Sturrock, Cape, London, 1968. It was not used by either Marx (who spoke of his ‘dialectical method’) or Engels (who uses the expression ‘materialist dialectic’), but seems to have been invented in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen, a socialist worker who corresponded with Marx. It was, however, on the basis of Engels’s work that Lenin developed this theory (in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, 1908) around three guiding themes: the ‘materialist inversion’ of the Hegelian dialectic; the historicity of ethical principles in their relation to the class struggle; and the convergence of the ‘laws of evolution’ in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin) and political economy (Marx). Lenin thus takes up a position between a historicist Marxism (Labriola) and a determinist Marxism, akin to ‘Social Darwinism’ (Kautsky). After the Russian Revolution, Soviet philosophy was divided between the ‘dialecticians’ (Deborin) and the ‘mechanists’ (Bukharin). The debate was settled by General Secretary Stalin who, in 1931, issued a decree identifying dialectical materialism with Marxism-Leninism (cf. René Zapata, Luttes philosophiques en URSS 1922–31, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1983). Seven years later, in the pamphlet Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), he codified its content, enumerating the laws of the dialectic – the foundation of the individual disciplines and of the science of history in particular, as well as the a priori guarantee of their conformity to the ‘proletarian world-view’. This system, known as diamat for short, was to be imposed on the whole of intellectual life in the socialist countries and, with varying degrees of resistance, on Western Communist parties. It was to serve to cement the ideology of the party-State and control the activity of scientists (cf. the Lysenko affair, studied by Dominique Lecourt in Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1977). However, we should add two correctives to this monolithic picture. Firstly, as early as 1937, with his essay ‘On Contradiction’ (in Four Essays on Philosophy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1966), Mao Tse-Tung had proposed an alternative conception, rejecting the idea of the ‘laws of the dialectic’ and stressing the complexity of contradiction (Althusser would later draw on this in his ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969; first French edition, 1965). Secondly, at least one school of thought – that led by Geymonat in Italy – made dialectical materialism the starting-point for a historical epistemology that is not without its merits (cf. André Tosel, ‘Ludovico Geymonat ou la lutte pour un matérialisme dialectique nouveau’, in Praxis. Vers une refondation en philosophie marxiste, Messidor/Éditions Sociales, Paris, 1984).

Yet let us repeat that these contradictions, these oscillations in no sense represent a weakness on Marx’s part. They bring into question the very essence of philosophical activity: its contents, its style, its method, its intellectual and political functions. This was true in Marx’s day and is probably still true today. It might therefore be argued that, after Marx, philosophy is no longer as it was before. An irreversible event has occurred, one which is not comparable with the emergence of a new philosophical point of view, because it not only obliges us to change our ideas or methods, but to transform the practice of philosophy. Marx is certainly not the only writer in history to have produced effects of this kind. In the modern age alone, there has also been Freud, to mention but one, though he operated in a different field and had other aims. However, comparable examples are, in fact, very rare. The caesura effected by Marx has been more or less clearly acknowledged, more or less willingly accepted; it has even given rise to violent refutations and strenuous attempts at neutralization. But this has only caused it to haunt the totality of contemporary philosophical discourse all the more and to work on that discourse from within.

This anti-philosophy which Marx’s thought at one point intended to be, this non-philosophy which it certainly was by comparison with existing practice, thus produced a converse effect to the one at which it was aiming. Not only did it not put an end to philosophy, but gave rise within it to a question which is now permanently open, a question from which philosophy has since been able to draw sustenance and which has contributed to its renewal. There is in fact no such thing as an ‘eternal philosophy’, always identical to itself: in philosophy, there are turning-points, thresholds beyond which there is no turning back. What happened with Marx was precisely a displacement of the site and the questions and objectives of philosophy, which one may accept or reject, but which is so compelling that it cannot be ignored. After this, we can at last return to Marx and, without either diminishing or betraying him, read him as a philosopher.

Where are we to look, in these conditions, for the philosophies of Marx? After the remarks I have just made, there can be no doubt as to the answer: in the open totality of his writings and there alone. Not only is there no distinction to be made between ‘philosophical’ and ‘historical’ or ‘economic’ works, but that division would be the surest way to fail to understand anything of the critical relation in which Marx stands to the whole philosophical tradition, and of the revolutionary effect he has had upon it. The most technical arguments in Capital are also those in which the categories of logic and ontology, the representations of the individual and the social bond, were wrested from their traditional definitions and re-thought in terms of the necessities of historical analysis. The most conjunctural articles, written at the time of the revolutionary experiences of 1848 or 1871, or for internal discussion within the International Working Men’s Association, were also a means of overturning the traditional relationship between society and State and developing the idea of a radical democracy which Marx had first sketched out for its own sake in his critical notes of 1843, written in the margins to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The most polemical of his writings against Proudhon, Bakunin or Lassalle were also those in which the discrepancy between the theoretical schema of the development of the capitalist economy and the real history of bourgeois society appears and forces Marx to outline an original dialectic, distinct from a mere inversion of the Hegelian idea of the progress of Geist …

In fact, each of Marx’s works is simultaneously imbued with philosophical labour and ranged confrontationally against the way the tradition has isolated and circumscribed philosophy (which is one of the driving forces of its idealism). But this gives rise to a final anomaly which, in a sense, he experienced within himself.

A break and ruptures

More than other writers, Marx wrote in the conjuncture. Such an option did not exclude either the ‘patience of the concept’ of which Hegel spoke, or the rigorous weighing of logical consequences. But it was certainly incompatible with stable conclusions: Marx is the philosopher of eternal new beginnings, leaving behind him many uncompleted drafts and projects … The content of his thought is not separable from his shifts of position. That is why, in studying him, one cannot abstractly reconstruct his system. One has to retrace his development, with its breaks and bifurcations.

In the wake of Althusser, discussion in the nineteen sixties and seventies was greatly preoccupied with the ‘break’ or ‘rupture’ which he saw as occurring in 1845, with some writers supporting his arguments and others contesting them. That break, contemporaneous with the emergence of the concept of ‘social relation’ in Marx, was seen as marking a point of no return, the origin of a growing distancing from the earlier theoretical humanism. I shall return to this term below. This continued rupture is, in my view, undeniable. Among its underlying causes are a number of immediate political experiences: in particular, the encounter with the German and French proletariats (the British proletariat in Engels’s case), and the active re-entry into social struggles (which has its direct counterpart in the exit from academic philosophy). Its content, however, is essentially the product of intellectual elaboration. On the other hand, there were at least two other equally important ruptures in Marx’s life, determined by events potentially ruinous for the theory which, at the time, he believed he could safely uphold. The result was that that theory could only be ‘rescued’ on each occasion by are-foundation, carried out either by Marx himself or by another (Engels). Let us recall briefly what were the ‘crises of Marxism’ before Marxism as such existed. This will also provide us with a general framework for the readings and discussions which follow.

Three sources or four masters?

The presentation of Marxism as a world-view long ago coalesced around the formula, the ‘three sources of Marxism’: German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy. This derives from the way in which Engels divided up his exposition of historical materialism in Anti-Dühring (1878), and sketched the history of the antithetical relations between materialism and idealism, metaphysics and dialectics. This schema would be systematized by Kautsky in a lecture of 1907 entitled ‘The Three Sources of Marxism. The Historic Work of Marx’, in which the ‘science of society, starting out from the standpoint of the proletariat’ is characterized as ‘the synthesis of German, French and British thought’. The intention was not only to promote internationalism, but to present the theory of the proletariat as a totalization of European history, ushering in the reign of the universal. Lenin was to adopt the formulation in a lecture of 1913, ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’. However, the symbolic model of a combination of the component parts of culture was, in reality, not new: it reflected the persistence of the great myth of the ‘European triarchy’, expounded by Moses Hess (who had used the expression as the title of one of his books in 1841) and taken up by Marx in his early writings, in which the notion of the proletariat made its appearance.

Once we put behind us the dream of effecting a totalization of thought in terms of this ‘three parts of the world’ archetype (a world bounded, significantly, by Europe), the question of the ‘sources’ of Marx’s philosophical thinking, i.e. of its privileged relations with the work of past theorists, becomes an open one. In an impressive recent work (Il filo di Arianna, Quindici lezioni di filosofia marxista, Vangelista, Milan, 1990), Constanzo Preve has given a lead here, assigning to Marx ‘four masters’: Epicurus (on whom he had written his thesis, ‘On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, 1841) for the materialism of freedom, given metaphorical expression in the doctrine of the clinamen or random ‘swerving’ of atoms; Rousseau, who supplies the idea of egalitarian democracy or association based on the direct participation of citizens in the formation of the general will; Adam Smith, from whom the idea that the basis of property is labour is taken; and, lastly, Hegel, the most important and the most ambivalent, a constant inspiration and adversary to Marx in his work on ‘dialectical contradiction’ and historicity. The advantage of this schema is that it directs attention towards the internal complexity of Marx’s work and the successive shifts which mark his critical relation to the philosophical tradition.

After 1848

The first crisis coincides with an epochal change for the whole of nineteenth-century thought: this was the failure of the revolutions of 1848. It is sufficient simply to read the Communist Manifesto (written in 1847) to understand that Marx had entirely shared the conviction that a general crisis of capitalism was imminent.³ This was to create a situation in which the proletariat, taking the lead for all the dominated classes in all (the) countries (of Europe), would establish a radical democracy which would itself lead, in short order, to the abolition of classes and to communism. The intensity and enthusiasm of the insurrections of the ‘springtime of peoples’ and the ‘social republic’ could not but seem to him to be the execution of that programme.

The disappointment, when it came, was therefore all the greater. The defection of a section of the French socialists to Bonapartism and the ‘passivity of the workers’ in the face of the coup d’état, coming as they did in the wake of the June massacres, were particularly demoralizing in their implications. I shall return below to the way this experience caused the Marxian idea of the proletariat and its revolutionary mission to waver. The extent of the theoretical upheavals this produced in Marx’s thinking cannot be underestimated. It meant abandoning the notion of ‘permanent revolution’, which precisely expressed the idea of an imminent transition from class to classless society and also the corresponding political programme of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (as opposed to the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’).⁴ It meant the enduring eclipse – for which I shall attempt to outline the theoretical reasons below – of the concept of ideology, which had only just been defined and scarcely been utilized. But it also led to the definition of a research programme bearing on the economic determination of political conjunctures and the long-term trends of social evolution. And it is at this point that Marx returns to the project of a critique of political economy, to recast its theoretical bases and carry it through to completion – at least up to the appearance of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. This involved him in unremitting labour which we may legitimately interpret as reflecting a strong desire to gain revenge upon victorious capitalism – and the anticipated conviction that he would do so – both by laying bare its secret mechanisms (mechanisms it did not itself understand) and demonstrating its inevitable collapse.

After 1871

Then, however, came the second crisis, in the form of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the Paris Commune. These events plunged Marx into depression, providing a stark reminder of the ‘bad side of history’ (to which we shall return), i.e. its unpredictable course, its regressive effects and its appalling human costs (tens of thousands dead in the war, tens of thousands of others killed in the semaine sanglante – not to mention the numbers deported – which, for the second time in twenty-five years, decapitated the revolutionary proletariat of France and struck terror into those of other countries). I cite this emotive catalogue of events only because we have to take the full measure of the break they represented. The European war ran counter to the idea Marx had formed of the directing forces and fundamental conflicts of politics. It reduced, at least in appearance, the importance of the class struggle by comparison with other interests and passions. The fact that the proletarian revolution broke out in France (and not in Britain) ran counter to the ‘logical’ schema of a crisis arising from capitalist accumulation itself. The crushing of the Commune revealed the disparity between bourgeoisie and proletariat in terms of forces and capacity for manoeuvre. Once again, there sounded the ‘solo … requiem’ of the workers of which The Eighteenth Brumaire had spoken.

Without doubt, Marx faced up to all this. He was able to read in the spirit of the defeated proletarians, short as their experiment had been, the invention of the first ‘working-class government’, which he regarded as having lacked only the force of organization. To the socialist parties that were then forming, he proposed a new doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the dismantling of the State apparatus in a ‘transitional phase’ in which the principle of communism would be ranged against the principle of bourgeois right. But he dissolved the International (which was riven by insurmountable contradictions). And he interrupted the writing of Capital, the draft manuscript remaining suspended in the middle of the chapter on ‘Classes’, to learn Russian and mathematics, and to embark, via an enormous amount of reading, on the rectification of his theory of social evolution. This task, interspersed with the settling of accounts with various individuals, was to occupy the last ten years of his life. It was to Engels, his constant partner in dialogue and, at times, his inspiration, that it would fall to systematize historical materialism, the dialectic and socialist strategy.

But let us not run ahead of ourselves. For the moment we are in 1845. Marx is twenty-seven. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena, is the former editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne and the Franco-German Yearbooks in Paris, and has been expelled from France, at the request of Prussia, as a political agitator. Though penniless, he has just married the young baroness von Westphalen and they have a little daughter. Like all those of his generation, the ‘class of forty-eight’, he saw himself as an up-and-coming young man.

Chronological table

1818	Marx born at Trier (Rhineland Prussia).
1820	Birth of Engels.
1831	Death of Hegel. Pierre Leroux in France and Robert Owen in Britain invent the word ‘socialism’. Revolt of the Canuts in Lyon.
1835	Fourier, La Fausse Industrie morcelée.
1838	Feargus O’Connor draws up the People’s Charter (the manifesto of British Chartism). Blanqui advocates the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
1839	Marx studies law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin.
1841	Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; Proudhon, What is Property?; Hess, Die europäische Triarchie; Marx’s doctoral thesis (‘On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’).
1842	Marx becomes editor of Rheinische Zeitung. Cabet, Voyage en Icarie.
1843	Carlyle, Past and Present; Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’. Marx in Paris: editor of Franco-German Yearbooks (containing ‘On the Jewish Question’ and ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’).
1844	Comte, Discours sur l’esprit positif; Heine, Deutschland, ein Winter-märchen. Marx writes the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and, with Engels, publishes The Holy Family; Engels publishes The Condition of the English Working Class.
1845	Stirner, The Ego and its Own; Hess, ‘On the Essence of Money’. Marx expelled to Belgium; draws up the Theses on Feuerbach and, with Engels, writes The German Ideology.
1846	The Poverty of Philosophy (a response to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty). Marx joins the League of the Just, which becomes the Communist League, for which, with Engels, he writes the Communist Manifesto in 1847.
1847	Ten-hour bill in Britain (limiting working day). Michelet, Le Peuple.
1848	European revolutions (February). Back in Germany, Marx becomes editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a revolutionary, democratic journal. ‘June Days’ massacre of French workers. Californian gold rush. Renan, The Future of Science (published in 1890); John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy; Thiers, De la propriété; Leroux, De l’égalité.
1849	Failure of the Frankfurt National Assembly and reconquest of Germany by the royal armies. Marx emigrates to London.
1850	Marx, Class Struggles in France; Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music.
1851	Louis Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.
1852	Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Communist League dissolved.
1853	Hugo, Les Châtiments; Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races.
1854–6	Crimean War.
1857	Ruskin, The Political Economy of Art; Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal.
1858	Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église; Mill, On Liberty; Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos.
1859	Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Work begins on the Suez Canal. Darwin, The Origin of Species. Englishwoman’s Journal (the first feminist periodical) founded.
1861	American Civil War. Abolition of slavery in Russia. Lassalle, System der erworbenen Rechte.
1863	Polish insurrection. Hugo, Les Misérables; Renan, Life of Jesus; Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Injured.
1864	Recognition of the right to strike in France. International Working Men’s Association founded in London: Marx elected as the General Council’s corresponding secretary for Germany.
1867	Disraeli extends male suffrage in Britain; customs union in Germany. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. French conquest of Cochinchina.
1868	First Trades Union Congress in Britain. Haeckel, Natural History of Creation; William Morris, The Earthly Paradise.
1869	German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party founded (Bebel, Liebknecht). Suez canal opened. Mill, The Subjection of Women; Tolstoy, War and Peace; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
1870–1	Franco-Prussian War. Proclamation of German Reich at Versailles. Siege of Paris and insurrection of Communards. Marx, The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council; Bakunin, God and the State.
1872	Hague Congress (break-up of the First International and transfer of the seat of the General Council to New York). Russian translation of the first volume of Capital. Darwin, The Descent of Man; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
1873	Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy.
1874	Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, or The Theory of Social Wealth.
1875	Gotha Congress at which German socialist parties (Lassalleans and Marxists) are unified. French translation of Volume 1 of Capital.
1876	Victoria crowned empress of India. Spencer, Principles of Sociology. International officially dissolved. Dostoyevsky, The Possessed. Fest-spielhaus at Bayreuth inaugurated.
1877	Marx, Letter to Mikhailovsky; Morgan, Ancient Society.
1878	Anti-socialist (or ‘Exceptional’) Law in Germany. Engels, Anti-Dühring, with a chapter by Marx.
1879	French Workers Party founded by Guesde and Lafargue. Irish Land League founded. Henry George, Progress and Poverty.
1880	Communards amnestied.
1881	Free, compulsory, secular primary education in France. Alexander II assassinated by the ‘Society for the Liberation of the People’. Dühring, Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschädlichkeit für Existenz, Sitte und Cultur der Völker … ; Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich.
1882	Engels, ‘Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity’.
1883	Death of Marx. Plekhanov sets up the ‘Emancipation of Labour’ group. Bebel, Woman and Socialism. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.